It will get substantially worse.
Fortunately, Blizzard increased the layer cap from 4 to 12, and then queues have come down slightly. But as a previous poster already indicated, this is nowhere near peak demand for the server. This is a random week in pre-patch. Wait until actual launch. We will likely see 50,000-person queues stretching almost 16 hours at their worst. And no, Blizzard cannot just magically “increase server capacity” - that would require hardware updates that they are assuredly not going to implement.
I think some people here might even have some misconceptions about how layers work. They’re virtualized environments with unique mobs, vendors and segregated player populations. But all the queries going back and forth from the server remain, regardless of how many layers you have. Although layers do succeed in dispersing some of the server load, they do not obviate it. Grobbulus is barely stable at 10 layers. Once you start getting past that number, things start going to hell. NPCs don’t respond, you cannot loot, you get stuck on flight paths. They could make 100 layers if they wanted to, but without increased server capacity it wouldn’t matter.
To make a long story short - more people currently want to play on Grobb than can feasibly play on Grobb.
There is no “solution” for this problem. Sure, they halted transfers. But they didn’t suspend new characters being created on the server, nor boosts. And although they have dangled a carrot on a stick with free transfers, the destination realms are absolutely dead. Sure, they might see a short-term uptick in activity with these transfers, but most people I know taking the free transfer are just doing so on an alt they don’t really care about, to play a little bit of WoW instead of staring at a queue. I cannot help but predict that Old Blanchy will be a ghost town a couple weeks into Wrath. Maybe Sulfuras will make it, maybe it won’t. But last I checked it was a 90% Horde realm, so you’re not looking at the type of activity, opportunity or world PvP balance that Grobbulus has. Least of all the utter lack of an RP scene. These transfers aren’t a solution, and as we can see from the persistent queues, the hyper-majority of players are failing to take this bait.
We’re going to have to deal with the queues going forward. They’re going to get longer. I think they will persist deep into the next expansion. Adjust your raid times, etc, accordingly. Eventually, enough people might quit from being literally unable to play after work/school that the queues might alleviate a bit. But people are stubborn, and really want to play Wrath, so I suspect that exodus to be a slow one.