I should report my recent experience as well.

Arrived around 19:00 on Vistara, connecting passengers were met at the gate by an agent and herded to the transfer area. He had some list and called out names or groups by connecting flight. My name was duly read out and he verified that I existed. Understandably low priority since my connection to Lot wasn't until the next morning, I was told to wait, and so I waited. And waited. I had an e-visa and a hotel reservation, and when nothing more seemed to be happening I asked the agent if I could just leave. No no, I was to sit and wait. This agent disappeared eventually and others took his place, and when I got bored of waiting an hour or two later and asked whoever was at the desk the same question, I was told that no, I must stay put, 'staff is coming.' This turned out to be the refrain over the course of the night. Every so often someone from the transfer desk would make the rounds of the waiting room and either ask me where I was connecting to, or seek me out by name or connecting flight, and upon verifying that I existed, "wait, staff is coming." Their shift would end a new face would show up and the same thing would happen.

Sometime around 3 or 4 AM the correct person eventually showed up and took my passport. He saw I had a bag checked through and became concerned after looking at his computer, consulted with someone else behind the desk, asked me hopefully if I maybe had said bag with me for some reason, made a couple of calls on his cell phone and told me that it was ok. (I was not reassured at the time but the bag did indeed arrive.) He then shredded the first boarding pass he had printed for me because he had forgotten to put the Lot ticket stock into the printer, the all-important "DT" notation was applied, and I was finally allowed to go through the arbitrary and capricious security where my fresh boarding pass was subjected to a solid 30 seconds of scrutiny but fortunately whatever sins I committed in correctly emptying my carry-on into bins for the x-ray paled in comparison with the sins of those on either side of me in line and I was allowed without further ado into the terminal, which finally felt like a normal international departure terminal and not the setting of a Kafka story.

An extremely kind member of the staff at the nearly empty AI lounge upon witnessing my sleep-deprived and purposeless shamble around the buffet intervened to assemble me a plate, for which I was deeply grateful.

I'm not sure what lessons to take away from this. Certainly if I had no bag (or were going straight home and merely content to have my bag show up eventually), I would ignore all transfer-related instructions and go straight out into the city. Maybe I should have done that anyway and assumed that any problems could be resolved at the check-in desk the next morning. And it would have been slightly empowering to arrive with a connecting boarding pass in hand, so perhaps I should have tried harder to get one at my origin.