Hessegebbabel
If you got $$$ (and assuming your definition of $$$ is close to a full ride) my logic is that they absolutely wanted you at their school, no?
Which means it is odd that they'd place you on the waitlist in the first place, that is unless they really didn't have any space to admit people in the April round.
If they had no space to admit people in April, what was the point of having that round?
Judging by the number of people that got waitlisted in the January round as well, I have the feeling that AdCom was too generous with acceptances in the earlier rounds and may not have selected the "best" class....
Firstly, to me $$$ just means some form of monetary incentive to attend the school. I will tell you that my scholarship is nowhere near a full ride but I'm not giving specifics so please don't ask.
OK so as far as selecting the best class goes. If you look at the Tuck profile on BW you can see that the accepted rate is around 20% and the yield is about 54%. That means they are giving out approx 500 places for 240 spots because they know that about 50% of those accepted will choose to go elsewhere.
This process has become difficult for Tuck because both the number of applications and the yield have unexpectedly increased in the past two years, i.e. more people from each of the first three rounds have accepted their places and paid a deposit. This has had the effect of turning the final round into an extremely competitive situation. Also significant is the mid 80% GMAT scores which are from 670 - 760, that means that they must have accepted a mixture of those scores in each of the first three rounds, which means they will be looking to fill the few final spots with people who will keep their averages high. Finally, from talking to the adcom I know that there were direct admits from each round and that several people have been moved off the WL and accepted.
So in short, I think your probably right that in retrospect the adcom were too generous in the first few rounds, but that was due to higher than expected yield, if yield was at it's normal levels then the adcom would have been spot on. However I don't think that the "quality" of the class will be affected because the adcom will have simply accepted a higher quality of students from the later rounds.
Hope all that makes sense...