Not sure that a scheduled restart would work. If people knew what time it was going to happen, afkers might just log in again right after the restart. For something like this to work, it would need to be random with players getting an ingame message of "servers are going down in x minutes." I understand that the problem started due to SE not being prepared, but I don't think people need to make the problem worse. Yes, they may have dealt with 1017 for hours before being able to log in but others are dealing with the same issue, and because there are people staying logged in all day, it expands the problem to times when server load should be less populated and creates false data for SE to work with since 1. servers seem fuller than they should be at certain times of day; 2. the log in system is not showing an accurate curve of when people would typically be logging in; and 3. even if the system is improving it wouldn't be noticeable because there are people afk even during active parts of the day. Yesterday being Saturday, I was surprised at the number of people I saw just sitting around afk as Saturday seems like it would be prime play time.
When it comes to being afk, I can understand doing it for an hour or two as "stepping away from the computer" ends up taking longer than someone expected, I can even understand occasionally getting distracted and forgetting to log off, but these are people who are refusing to ever log off.