I thought I'd post this (speculation) as a potential ray of sunshine this week. I was taking a look at the Q3 FY2020 data (April to June 2020) and if I'm reading this right it looks like there could be about to be significantly more throughput in application processing.
I'm basing this off the following number of received AOS applications (family/work/total):
Q1 2020: 101,936/40,239/142,175
Q2 2020: 83,323/26,489/109,812
Q3 2020: 43,632/12,301/55,933
As you can see that's a pretty significant drop in cases (both overall and also for each category. Worth noting that as of end of Q3 2020 the pending number was around 330,000, but given that it looks like submitted AOS forms from Q2 2020 are already being processed for interview on the forum, I wonder if we will see things start to speed up a bit for Q3/Q4 2020 applicants given it looks like a lot fewer applications were submitted during COVID...
Fingers crossed!