No, it's because people with suckass internet started hosting because of Badspot adding UPnP.
I like your view
This could be a problem with the host's connection or their computer's capability. I don't think a problem with the master server would cause that.
But what about Kalph's server?
When he made that "Sell dedi servers?" topic or whatever it was, he said in the thread he had some very nice computer stuff :P I forgot what it was, but it was good enough for him to keep 4 dedi servers running
And I was just at his server the other day, and his server had 300 ping
When I go on Blockland I see just about all the servers with a ping over 200-300. I used to see servers with a 100 ping and i thought that was high