Rolex don't do artificial scarcity and hype campaigns around limited runs like other brands have taken to do. They're at max capacity and if you want to buy one you've just got to get on the list, no short cuts.
You can't just expand willy-nilly. It takes tons of investment, money, and you need to find a labor force. And what happens if demand softens (like it's doing at this very moment)? Then you're stuck with a bunch of extra capacity doing nothing.
Digging a bit, it seems the wait-list really started to be a thing in 2019.
> It takes a ton of investment.
I'm not an expert, but for an "assembled by hand" luxury product it seems like incremental capacity is much lower risk. They don't need to stand up a factory. Couldn't they hire and train 10% more technicians for assembly? And when demand softens, scale back?
I suspect you’re underestimating what it takes to train a technician for his kind of work. I imagine that could easily be a multi-year process (10 years even), and require a lot of attention from your highly skilled and already in-demand master practitioners.
That doesn't make any sense... The only reasons why you would think they are not restricting supply would be if demand varies randomly widely or if the people planning production and/or purchasing are incompetent.
As determined by what? Probably the current manufacturing facilities that they have strategically chosen not to expand.