Yes this IS an important (and worsening) safety issue which is being completely neglected.
Eagle-eyed I have to agree that unfortunately you missed the point and you have also missed the growing severity of the problem. It is easy to be fooled into thinking that the no seat allocation model and priority for those that wanht to pay for it model has worked ok for some years now, but that would be an incorrect assumption to apply to the current still-changing situation. On a 189 seat 738 the priority boarding queue often appears to be half of the total thesedays. As a habitual late arriver but one of the new hoardes of experienced canny queuers myself, and as a father of young kids once, I can tell you that a family such as the OP doesn't stand a chance at many gates.
As of recently (when the majority of the queue is now likely to become free of charge "priority"), priority boarding is a shameful joke and I seriously believe that Ryanair in particular must now be taken to court for unfairly discriminating against families and others vulnerables in the poorly controlled crowd situation created by their continually changing procedural model. Sadly I am not sure what law could be used for best effect as it is not quite the same as the clear breach of statute when discriminating against disabled.
But unfair discrimination is what this is first and foremost, and unsafe is the secondary effect. The correct solution is easy - we go back to positive discrimination of families with young children first. Sadly some of these locos seem to have an agenda to promote a certain kind of bad citizenship to suit their need for rapid turnaround.
Until Ryanair and others are forced to be better citizens then I am wholly with rmac on this. As BAA and airport police are nowhere to be seen at the gates and abdicate all everyday public order matters to low could care less cost contractors, it seems it is up to us (the rest of us in the queue with some leadership ability) to cause the queue to come to order, and once on board to effect some kind of common sense adjustment in the cabin without getting ourselves accused of disorderly behaviour in the process...