This is an all too common occurrence on Serverfault. Most of the times I've attempted to edit something, the queue is full. I'm aware of that it takes time to empty the queue, but having a constantly full queue is obviously not good for the health of the community.
Close votes was recently changed from 5 to 3. Would something similar for edits work? Reduce rep required for voting and submitting unvetted edits?
I always thought it was kind of silly to require someone who has a high enough reputation to edit a post themselves without approval from others must get approval from others to approve someone else's suggested edit. One of these days I'll be bored enough to go look for why that is still a thing.
In the meantime I went to the suggested edits queue and got only 9, though presumably that's because some moderators cleaned it out. But us mere mortals are limited to reviewing 20 of them per day, so unless a lot of people go into review, they will languish.
(Update a day later: And those I reviewed yesterday are just now getting that second approval this morning.)
The problem is, there's little reason for anyone to go review things, except perhaps out of sheer altruism, and there's very little gamification on reviews either. I'm not sure this has a good solution, though I can think of some really bad solutions.
I haven't been tracking the review-queues for various reasons, thanks for bringing up the lack of community involvement in the edit queue. That's one a moderator can help clean out with less controversy (our votes are binding, for everyone else you need a vote-count) than the close/re-open queues.
