I've been asking myself the same question. Cyrodiil feels empty or it lags. There is no inbetween. They couldn't possibly lower the population cap any more, yet the lag starts before Cyrodiil is even full. Didn't use to be that way. At least I don't think so.

Rich Lambert appears to recognize the issue, but my confidence in ZOS being willing and able to do something about it hit rock bottom a while ago. Talk doesn't cut it anymore. If I think about Rich's streams for too long, it just makes me angry. Those admissions surfacing now feel like a reaction to New World, even if Rich may turn out to be the good guy trying to nudge ZOS in the right direction and his transparency is welcome. Alas, there's no point in getting worked up. If ZOS ever fix PvP, it will be welcome. I don't know whether they're working on it or whether they're capable.

As a programmer their Cyrodiil testing, last year, felt as reasonable as it was clumsy. There are ways to orchestrate code for performance evaluation without changes to the gameplay. Those could have been refined every weekly patch, silently in the background. Statistical performance monitoring methods don't impact performance of a running system much. You don't need to rely on some third party tool that may or may not exist for your development environment either. Certainly if the core of the engine is written in C/C++ - albeit I don't know how much Lua they use on the server - and you have the source code, you can bake performance monitoring right into the code. Furthermore you can do it in a performant way. You just need to use techniques that avoid CPU bus locks and avoid or keep thread synchronisation to a minimum. Perhaps they were also doing that kind of work, I don't know. Certainly their decision to disallow procs felt as much a social experiment as a performance-related one. I don't think that was just about performance.

They've been trying to find low hanging fruit. Ways to avoid putting in the hard work. That's fair enough. Only it's been going on for 6 years and lag as steadily gotten worse instead of better.