what makes waiting spaces feel designed versus merely tolerated? | Why does the inbetween time get stripped out of so many projects?

Every twenty feet or so the ceiling dropped, the path narrowed slightly, then opened again into a larger space. Pure psychology. Compression and release, borrowed straight from cathedral architecture. The guests around me barely noticed consciously, but their pace changed, their voices dropped. Then you hit the final room before load and it was this vast dead space with a single flat video screen and metal railings. All that careful pacing just dumped. I see the same fracture in transit stations, hospital lobbies, concert venues. Designers master the approach, the arrival, the peak moment. The intermediate state of simply waiting gets treated like a problem to solve rather than an experience to design. Put in a screen, call it distraction, move on. The waits that actually work give you something to do with your body. Lean rails at proper height. Steps that invite perching. Edges to set a bag on. Social spacing that lets groups reform naturally. These are furniture problems, architectural problems, but also fundamentally about respecting that humans are still physical creatures even when they are paused. What fields outside experience design handle this well? I keep thinking about traditional marketplaces, train platforms in certain cities. Places where waiting was never designed out because it could not be.