I can confirm this has always been the case at SFO. To be honest, the DL lounge there is one of the nicer DL lounges so if you found it 'old and rusty', I'd recommend you avoid DL lounges in general many of which are much worse The AF lounge does get very full but the KL flight leaves a bit earlier so it is possible that when you went there people had not arrived yet. They would have arrived not that much later. I too would have preferred using the AF lounge for the newspaper etc but unfortunately I don't think it will change...