I travelled the whole route and visited all new entrances to every station.
I think people are kind of expecting it to be like the tube as it's branded like a tube line. But it was designed exactly to speed up journeys across central London.
It's like Thameslink but that is much slower and feels different because the Thameslink core stations are close together, and lots of branches converge at the necks plus needing to change from overhead wires to third rail.
The long dwell times may be a case of being overprepared. If they were too short the timetable would be thrown off as delays accumulated. Don't know if they were expecting it to be busier thus requiring longer dwell times, but I was surprised at how uncrowded it felt, everyone who wanted to sit was able to the entire day including during the rush hours.
I don't know if it's because the stations and trains are much bigger and/or capacity of transport across London has suddenly doubled(?) and hasn't attracted newer commuters yet / maybe commuting is still reduced from covid effects.
On the central section dwell times are a minimum 30 seconds for Bond St, Custom House, Farringdon, Whitechapel and Woolwich. For the other stations it’s a 1 minute minimum.
That’s reflective of how busy they expect the stations to be. There could be some adjustments but that has an impact on the timetable and operation of the line and especially the central section. Outside of that trains also need to fit in with the existing network rail timetables.
Crossrail will increased rail capacity by approx 10% when it’s fully running with 24 trains an hour on the central section.
The line has only been running a couple of days so it’s impossible to tell yet if it has increased the number of new commuters. But new commuters are only part of the rational for the line - it was to help reduce overcrowding on the central line.