My conspiracy theory? I think US SE branch are incompetent.

Now obviously I wouldn't know who made the decisions anyway but... lumping NA and EU servers together? I wonder if I'm allowed to say "There's your problem! Derp!"

All I can really say is... someone, somewhere along the line... went cheap on the servers. Or underestimated the popularity of ARR and did not prepared enough NA/EU servers. And signed a year (or several years) worth of server service contract. Thus we're stuck with what hardware we're currently seeing.

Now that it's too late... the Dev team has to optimize what hardware they have just days before release. Hopefully, by the 2nd month when people start subbing (if enough people sub), they'll look into getting a contract with a different server company.