It's the Steam API.. you just have to wait a few days, it's still not even a guarantee. Just a really overall bad server browser. Confirmed directly with the server developer on Skype. It's time people start using third party launchers like Survival Launcher or TopArkServers.com to be quite honest.
Yep, game is heavily reliant on single core CPU power. Nothing else matters. Not disk/io, not network i/o, not DDR3 vs DDR4, not memory speed. NOTHING except CPU single core frequency matters. Best bet right now is water-cooled 4970k or like you said, a lottery chip overclockable beyond a stock 4790...