Mine is still very much on order and I'm excited to get it. I understand the gripes about price as Sony has stuck to the typical Canon and Nikon flagship pricing, whereas both of them have lowered their prices (and in the case of the R5ii and Z8, quite a lot). This said, I don't get the disappointment with the a1ii from a feature upgrade standpoint. It seems to me that in the digital age (and even moreso in the film age), most of the manufacturers' releases were pretty incremental with game changing releases being few and far between. Of all the cameras I've handled or been familiar with in Sonyland, the a7s (low light video), a9 (20fps and tracking) and a1 might be considered lightning strikes.
I'm much less familiar with Nikon and Canon, but I would ask those who are, how many of their releases were lightning strikes? For Canon, I was around for the 5D2 which I think qualifies. The R5 likely also qualifies, but the R5ii seemed to get a similar lackluster reception as the a1ii. Were there other lightning strikes, or were they mostly solid iterations?
From Nikon, in the run up to the Z9, what I heard a lot of was hope for a "D3 moment". In the intervening years there were a lot of other releases. How many of those upgrades brought more to the table than a1 to a1ii or R5 to R5ii?