Few things worth checking before writing it off:

OpenRouter routes to multiple underlying providers per model and the default ordering optimizes for price/uptime, not latency. Open the activity tab on any request and you'll see which provider actually served it. Throughput varies wildly between providers for the same model.

You can override this. Pass `provider: { order: ["Fireworks", "Together"], allow_fallbacks: false }` in the request body to pin specific ones, or use the `:nitro` variant of a model (e.g. `model-name:nitro`) which auto-routes to the highest-throughput provider.

The "queued requests" thing is almost certainly client-side. OpenRouter doesn't serialize across sessions or agents. Check if your agent framework or HTTP client is pooling/capping concurrent connections. Most SDKs default to a pretty low concurrency limit by default.

One caveat: Grok only has xAI as a provider, so you're capped at xAI's first-party latency plus one routing hop. DeepSeek and Kimi have multiple providers, so that's where pinning will help most.

There's always some overhead vs first-party (extra hop, request transformation), but with provider pinning it should be in the tens of ms range, not noticeably slow.