I'm not saying they did a terrible job. I said they worked well with what they had and were a good group of people.
If you do recall, I made the OP Shoot thread on coscom that you saw BEFORE you saw the one that this group had posted on the A-Kon boards. Whether or not there would have been a shoot or not is moot because I had already made a thread dedicated to getting a shoot started. Then we found the other group had already set things up before the thread on coscom was posted. It's not like there wouldn't have been one.
This is just my personal take on the situation, as I was there to observe the entirety of the press room shoot and the inside portion of the second one:
The problem with this shoot was really not in the fault of the organizers completely. Actually the main fault is well over half of the people that eventually made it to the shoot, were late, and we actually waited 30 minutes without doing much of anything to wait on everyone else to get there.
The only thing I could point out wrong that they themselves did was spend a bunch of time on Luffy poses (and they started to get into Zoro) when there were other characters, who don't have as many poses, and in much heavier costumes, dying in the back of the room. That's more of a nitpick then a genuine complaint. But myself as well as a couple of the Crocs had shown up early/on time and had been standing in that hot room for a very long time. When Jinbei showed up, he was kept waiting long enough for his make-up to start melting off.
With most shoots you don't spend even 5-10+ mins shooting one character, especially when you are in a room with a TIME LIMIT.
I understand that photoshoots mostly start late. 10 minutes is understandable, 15-20 minutes is meh, but acceptable, 30+ minutes is unacceptable mostly when you have a strict time limit and you have to be out of there at a certain time. It's rude for the people who were on time and it's rude to the people who come after. As seen by the Volcaloid group telling us to GTFO at 1 on the dot.
The above really doesn't apply to most informal gatherings, but when you've got a reservation for a spot or room that other people will be using directly after you, its important to get there on time.
This also happened at the Acen shoot, but the difference was the organizer knew how to manage his time, we did get a full, satisfying photoshoot in 30-40ish minutes.
So no, it wasn't nessicarily a bad thing that we waited 30 minutes for the rest of the group to get there, it could have been slightly more efficient. It was a success though that everyone got some sort of picture taken even with the setbacks, so at the end of the day, it was sucessful, even if it didn't run as smooth as silk.
I don't think you understand the position 100% because you guys were one of the last people to show up, and the ones most people were waiting for.
I also don't think you guys realized when you got there, you stole the show. Be super flattered about that, really, you guys were AMAZING <3. No one was or is mad at you guys, so don't feel like you did anything wrong, just understand how the rest of us, especially the ones in the large costumes who had been waiting since before or not long after the shoot was supposed to start, could feel kind of meh about how it was run, since so much time was devoted to basically to 2 groups while the rest waited it out.
For me that's not a common occurrence, except for when we try to stage courtroom scenes at PW shoots, most shoots aim to give every group a good amount of picture time. Or at least equal (in Hetalia there's so many groups you cant give everyone 5 minutes, you're lucky to get 2 XD)
For clarification, I'm not saying the larger costume people should have gone FIRST, it's there should not have been 10+ minutes devoted to Luffy on top of the fact we waited around for 30 minutes. That would have been peachy if we had the full hour to work with, as we didn't have that many people or groups, but when we crammed the shoot into less then half of that time, it was not cool.
Also the organizers themselves labeled the press room shoot "official" while the following gathering "unofficial". From how it was described to be, it sounded like the press room would be the serious stuff/standard photoshoot group shots, while unofficial was meant to be more fun stuff.
Ok that's my text wall on that. I think the differences here is you were looking at it with big, glossy, happy, they can't do no wrong eyes since you don't get to go to many conventions and were SUPER EXCITED, while I was in the total mindset of "I'm tired of convention after convention of not fun shoots and I am so upset with the situation in my life right now/stressed to the max that any slight disappointment pisses me off and ruins my day".
We're on total opposite ends of the spectrum here. I think if I had been in a neutral, normal mood (and not having a panic attack after spending 30 minutes getting that damn coat on because no one was there to help me) I would have been super excited and actually would have spoke up earlier to start taking pictures and get the ball rolling and probably would only gripe about that people were so late (and it wouldnt be a huge deal). But I'm in such a non confrontational mood I didn't do anything about it .