I completely agree with the realm locked aspect. If there’s a time limit before opening up however, I’d prefer it to be more like 30 minutes. 10 minutes will work for the mega servers, because they’ll always find people, but I’d prefer to wait longer for people on my own server, than be exposed to the toxicity of those megaservers.
Either that or a toggle to say “never go to a cross-realm pool”, so I can use cross-realm while levelling (if necessary) and then turn it off for high level content and just wait longer.