It is a sucky situation about the timing they gave you... but in saying that i think people need to be a bit more practical about the whole situation, basically nothing happened from march till august and while they might have mismanaged the situation there's not a lot anyone can do about a pandemic. If we're all going off 12 months timetable, then remember they still have 6 months worth of applications BEFORE march to go through so there's bound to be some screw ups somewhere, especially with the thousands of applications they must have sitting there.
I'm looking at it like this - sure they got the application in march, but no aor until august so in my mind the 12 months guideline starts then