It has been like two weeks since Erin died, and Mrsha was dyed prior to that.

From what was described, the living queens have to “capture” the easence of an Antinium when it dies, in order to perform the rite. Many of the Antinium on the boats were in some sort of stasis/sleep, and it is likely many of the queens were so. The queens that were “awake” might not have had the chance to capture said essence due to being busy with all the attacks.

Or, the other queens could have easily been out of range when they died – ships don’t often sail that close to each other, because it risks collisions and other damage. I believe it was also states somewhere it takes like 3 minutes for an Antinium to drown. A ship that is sunk can drift down really far in 3 minutes, putting them.even farther out of range when they finally die.

It’s also possible they did capture the essence of other queens, but simply had no idea how to make a viable body that would hold them. Even with the changes they had to make to allow the current queens to give birth via their bodies, they are much, much larger than both the worker and soldier bodies. Trying to shove a queen brain inside that small of a body could just not work at all. By the time they figured out how to make something that maybe would have been viable, it could have been too late.

It would be worse storytelling if a newly-made gold rank team was able to accomplish what probably dozens or hundreds of other teams have failed to do, including named rank teams and armies. The Horns aren’t anywhere close to strong enough to do this quest by themselves, and it’s pretty silly to think it would be a good story to make the plucky underdogs vanquish a death zone that teams much, much stronger than them have likely failed at.

Remember that Rags took her tribe to this.village, and even thousands of goblins could barely make it past the outskirts of the village, let alone make headway into the deeper parts. Goblins may be weak, but thousands of them using decent tactics are going to be far, far stronger than any gold rank team, and probably many named rank teams.

She wasn’t referring to the existing Antinium for the upgrades, but doing what she is now doing: newly birthed Antinium will have the upgrades she worked on, as well as the upgrades from all the other hives now that they’re connected again. Considering it said it takes about a month to birth new Antinium, this would be pretty well sticking to that timeline, given that the birthing sacs had to be updated.

Given the attrition rate of the Free Hive due to the dungeon, the vast majority of drones would have had the upgrades within a few months, prior to Erin changing things. Updating existing bodies seems like it would be way too costly and time consuming to consider, even for the Individuals.