As for my own conclusions/opinions...

1) We are seeing the logical and inevitable effect of players being able to move freely. In the absence of any technical constraints imposed by the game designer (SE), people are going to cluster together because they all benefit from doing so. It's easier to find groups, it's easier for DF to pop, etc. It's just easier to play the game when players cluster together.

2) As for *why* Aether became the de facto "place to play in NA", it doesn't really matter anymore. It's already happened.

3) We can see that Crystal and Primal, communities that were about equal to Aether prior to DC travel, have not been immune to this powerful pull to a single data center, which, unfortunately for them, has become Aether and not Crystal or Primal.

4) Crystal has more PF entries in "other", and indeed, unique player housing is something that one data center can offer that another can't.

5) One wonders what the purpose of being on Primal and Dynamis is at this time.

This is one shapshot in time, but I hope that SE is collecting and looking at this kind of data and thinking about what DC travel naturally does to the people who don't happen to be on the DC where people actually play content.