Sounds like you have absolutely NO idea just how bad NA infrastructure in general is.
There's a reason why topics like net neutrality is a huge topic in the US. It isn't a secret that North American ISPs are scummy as hell and that NA internet infrastructure is way, WAY behind much of the rest of the developed world, even disregarding the fact that the US alone is much larger than, say, Japan/Korea. When there's no competition in much of the US in terms of ISPs, there's no reason for them to improve our routing for our little games. Instead, they're spending their efforts on constantly looking for new ways to gouge us out of our money for the least amount of effort involved.
Google Fiber causes the ISPs to shat out bricks and magically provide better service wherever they announce they're moving in for a reason.
It's unlikely SE even knew about how NA routing works from how the server move went. It was probably just much cheaper to maintain the servers in Sacramento CA (especially since the company where the NA data centers are housed was bought out by SE shortly before the server relocation), and that's it. Moving the servers to say, Chicago, would have improved the experience for everyone overall, but it would have far less to do with the distance and much more to do with how routing works throughout all of the US.
