Excellent OP - behind you 100% (and leading with my sights slightly

)
I personally think that the match-making and/or server querying is slightly broken. If you look at the leaderboards there appear to be a lot of people actually playing, so where are they...?
I play from 9pm to around 3am GMT, which must equate to 4 to 10pm on the US east coast and 1 to 7pm on the west coast. These are not abnormal playing hours, yet the server list reports no games 80~90% of the time.
Maybe the match-maker splits the community across several servers, so you can only find the sub-set that happen to have been put on your server..? I dunno, but it definitely feels like something is wrong. Which is a shame because this game is great online (once you have a game) and the longevity of a game is made or broken by it's multiplayer (in most instances).