Player from Europe here as well *waves*
I have no issue with the combat latency - though I do admit it is definitely tougher here than it may be in Japan, I've seen fellow Botanists sweep areas in the time it takes me a couple of attempts. Saying that, I also do not use any voice chat during the game. Moles are a strange one to struggle with, I found that the moment they burrow if I just run away things will be fine. Generally I see their dot on the minimap appear about half a second before they come out, and they always come up where I was standing at that point in time though if I keep running I'm good to go.
Latency is (of course) longer than those in other areas, but compared to the European World of Warcraft servers it seems just a bit longer to respond (in general lag terms). My moves and such fire off without a hitch (Interesting tip, you don't need to wait for the animation to finish to fire off your next move, just hit it when you would expect it to finish had the animation started immediately). If France is anything like the UK it may be ISP throttling if you find it extreme - took our household forever to fix issues with many games as our ISP would clamp down on anything resembling actual use of the thing we paid for.
*Edit* If I recall, it was a massive crackdown on the ports and such used for torrent style downloads, I'd assume that the patch downloader would come under that and perhaps related programs would be targetted also. Hopefully it is something simple to bring your latency to decently playable levels.
In terms of seeing folk do things much later than they actually do, again, me and my brother used to play World of Warcraft together, and no matter what he did I would, if we started running at the same time, be a good twenty five foot ahead of him (probably around two seconds) and that was on the same connection in the same house! However, differences in hardware was pretty massive.
Just for information, my maximum (and average) connection speed is 7Mbps down, and around 761kbps up.
I wouldn't want segregated servers, just started DC Universe Online, and realised immediately with a sinking feeling that I had to choose between playing on EU servers (located in America no doubt, like previous SOE games) or be able to play with the USA. Not a choice I enjoy.