perfect is the enemy of good as all software is typically broken to a certain extent
if the late join feature is not working well make it an advanced feature and let me the end user choose whether to use it or not
disabling the late join feature is the wrong R&D development choice
after working at 20 companies in 30+ years in silicon valley as a lead software developer there are key factors to consider to make your end users happy and therefore your product successful (not a poser btw my profile on LinkedIn is public - Jeff Ronne)
I realize that there are support issues with a somewhat flaky feature but there are better choices for end users and zwift, turning something off and then back on is also needlessly costly
end user use cases matter
my use case and the key reason I use zwift is that I ride 2 to 3 hours a day when I use zwift
I use group rides for motivation selecting those group rides that closely match my power levels
I am required to use late join daily to join together multiple group rides as group rides never start and stop with previous and subsequent group rides in mind
often times the time to change from group ride to another group ride takes so long that I miss the next group ride or get dropped because everyone has already left the starting line, sprinting at 5 w / kg just to catch up because of slow software sucks
sometimes zwift crashes or has latency issues and late join is the acceptable software patch to recover from this error