Good question! That does, indeed, sound a little strange. We don't have enough information to give you a definitive answer, but we can provide a little information that might help it make a bit more sense.

Firstly, the status you see on character select is dynamic. So just because it says that Cerberus is "poor" and a North American world is "good," this may just be a temporary state. In the event of any technical difficulties on your end, on the server's end, or anywhere in between, this status can be temporarily degraded. It may even be that your connectivity to everything was effectively "poor" at the time you looked at Cerberus and got better by the time you looked at the other world.

Secondly, although you're right that a server physically closer to you should reasonably be expected to be easier to connect to, that's not entirely how the internet works. Just like with airline travel, sometimes the routes data takes online are a bit counter-intuitive. So it could be that a specific piece of the journey from you to the Chaos data center is problematic while the journey from you to a geographically-farther data center bypasses that problem.

So an easy first step might be to see if these connection statuses are consistent.