Oh they are taking their customers into consideration OP.
Ya see, what would happen is. SE would have maintenance at a time when the least amount of players were effected.
However, those players would come to the forums and QQ about not being able to play. The cycle would rinse and repeat itself until SE decided to be considerate and change up maintenance times. However, by changing up maintenance times SE would be inconveniencing an even bigger number of players. So in order to try and please both groups, I imagine they're doing a live live maintenance. (This is my theory based on my own observations.)

Personally, I wish they would just take the servers off line for the maintenance. I find it more disruptive when they try and do live maintenance and people end up lagging, 90k, or the instance servers go down... Tbh, I just log at start of maintenance so I don't have to deal with the issues. XD