Many problems are not magically solved by throwing more machines at them. The problem Minefold's blog post lazily describes as 'single point of failure' actually encapsulates certain classes of problems that are intrinsically singular; as it happens, friends lists are one of them.
No matter how much horizontal and vertical scaling you do, it will eventually be possible for a player to create a friends list that has so many friends on it that operations on it end up becoming prohibitively expensive. Friends list operations end up effectively being JOINs.
So your theory is that problems with friends list are keeping people in 30+ minute queues to play the game? Because otherwise you are straw manning me.
I agree, just throwing AWS at the problem doesn't solve it, as demonstrated by this catastrophe. On the other hand, many people, including OP have managed to build scalable gaming systems on top of AWS where EA/Maxis for the moment appear to have failed quite dramatically.
Yes it's a hard problem, but it doesn't seem off base distilling the OP's argument down to "they have done the cloud wrong".
No matter how much horizontal and vertical scaling you do, it will eventually be possible for a player to create a friends list that has so many friends on it that operations on it end up becoming prohibitively expensive. Friends list operations end up effectively being JOINs.