Finally this is brought to light! I was in DC for the inauguration. We got lucky as some woman gave us tickets which allowed us to get in to the orange section. There was a group from my sons high school though and they waited in a line for access to the mall in a massive line (sons friend said at 8:00am it was the longest line he had ever seen). They waited for 5 hours and never got in! They ended up going down to the Washington Monument and hung out there during the ceremony. We tried to go to the parade but it was completely disorganized. We tried to access the parade route from the south side through the mall but all the access points were closed. The officers would not give us any information just that we could try the next entrance down several blocks. We walked for one hour in a massive loop around the parade route and when we finally reached an entrance on the north side the entrances that were open had long lines but we could see that they were only letting a few people through. Based on the pace they were letting people through we decided to forget it as my kids at this point just wanted to go home as they were exhausted.
Your experience tracks with reports from friends/acquaintances that I have heard.