Although I lost the conversation in steam, someone approached me with this issue.
There is a feature that times out lobbies after perhaps 90 minutes when they don't start.
His point is that, in NA, at 5am, it is typical for a lobby to fill in longer time than that.
I think the suggestion is to have some sort of sliding scale for lobby fill timeouts that are based more on time of day and not assuming busy tf2c and lots of players.
His contention is that the way TF2C is used and that lobbies fill during the non-busy times is different and this is hurting playability.