Anyone arrive at a gathering node, try to collect it without effect, only to have another character run up on it (often seemingly out of nowhere) a FULL 2 SECONDS LATER, and take it?

I would assume this is lag, a function of action originated on another character's client through the server back out to my client. But the length of time this actually seems to take, realtime and even on a "low-latency" (sub-100ms) connection, seems rather ridiculous.

On the other side of this, I have often successfully initiated a gathering action, and a split second later had another character run up on the node without effect... I would assume this is what it looks like from the perspective of the character that initiated the gathering.

I wish ESO worked like GuildWars2, with each gathering node private to all characters. There would need to be be fewer active gathering nodes and a longer respawn interval, but you would never end up in a locality that had been cleaned out (unless you backtracked through an area yourself). These days, it really doesn't seem like any part of the world is particularly uncontended except in the most transient fashion. These days, basically anywhere I take a character, and at all times of day (3am my local North America time is typical for me, I suffer from a sleep disorder and keep an odd schedule), the world invariably has at least one "farmer" in operation in my immediate vicinity (a bot, someone else with a sleep disorder, someone in a time zone halfway accross the world, doesn't matter), and gathering becomes a variation on the game of leap-frog.