Why would calling a Senior manager do any good?
They know about the issue, they deal with misconnections on a daily basis for all sorts of the reasons. They will be in an office trying to work out how best to get 100s of people on thier way on what is still part of the busiest 2 weeks of the year for air travel and will then feed that information down to the front line agents. Just because a senior manager isn't there in the front line doesn't mean they aren't trying to fix the problem. I never gave out the numbers to such departments when I was on the front line. The last thing those people need is passengers harassing them when they are trying to shut out all external distractions and focus on rerouting 100s of people onto flights with no seats. It might not be the best experience, but someone will be working on these things and when such large numbers of people are involved patience, even several hours of it, is all that is needed. You can't just click your fingers and expect to get people moving when there has been massive disruption.