Urgent: XML sitemap not fixing indexing issues, what's wrong?

hey everyone, i'm pulling my hair out here and seriously need some help. our 'Free XML Sitemap Generator' tool isn't doing what it's supposed to, or maybe i'm just completely missing something fundamental about google indexing. it's driving me nuts!

we recently launched a pretty big content hub on our SaaS site. the whole point was to get a ton of new, valuable content out there and make sure Google picked it up super fast. naturally, the first thing i did was fire up our 'Free XML Sitemap Generator' to create a comprehensive XML sitemap. i generated it, submitted it to Google Search Console (GSC), and thought, "great, now we wait for the traffic to roll in."

but nope. the core problem is, despite submitting that sitemap weeks ago, Google is barely indexing any of our new pages. i'm constantly checking GSC and seeing a sea of "Discovered - currently not indexed" and "Crawled - currently not indexed" statuses for literally hundreds of URLs. this is directly causing massive indexing issues and, as you can imagine, absolutely zero organic traffic for this new content. it's just sitting there, invisible.

i've tried everything i can think of, and i'm running out of ideas:

• i've regenerated the sitemap 3-4 times with the tool, each time re-submitting it to GSC, thinking maybe the initial one had a glitch. no change.
• double-checked our `robots.txt` file multiple times. there are absolutely no disallows for the relevant content paths.
• scoured all the new pages for any rogue `noindex` tags in the HTML header. nothing there either.
• verified that all canonical tags are correctly self-referencing.
• i've even gone through server logs looking for any obvious crawl errors or issues that might be blocking Googlebot. everything looks normal on that front.
• i've tried "Request Indexing" in GSC for a few critical pages. sometimes it works for one or two, but it's not scalable and hasn't fixed the overall problem.
• i've waited over a week, hoping for Google to just catch up or for some magical update. still waiting.

so, i'm desperate. could there possibly be a hidden flaw in how our 'Free XML Sitemap Generator' actually generates the file, causing these persistent indexing issues? like some subtle formatting error that GSC isn't flagging but Googlebot dislikes?

• are there any specific sitemap validators beyond what GSC offers that i should be using to check for deeper issues?
• is it possible that our server response time is just too slow for Googlebot, even if the sitemap itself is perfectly structured? (though our general site speed is decent).
• are there any advanced GSC reports or checks for google indexing that i'm completely missing that could shed light on this?

seriously, any insights or past experiences with similar crawling and indexing problems would be an absolute lifesaver right now. i'm open to anything.

Thanks in advance!