Same issue here in South Africa.
Part of the reason is that even if all people queue for SQDM or TDM, the matchmaking will split them if they are not in a party to try and fill all slots across servers instead of filling a server up one at a time - leading to no small scale games ever being filled enough to play.
And as OP says, bots never fill up the server. In fact, I don't think they fill the server at all - if 10 bots are added, each bot is removed once a player joins, then that player takes the bot's slot and the player eventually leaves since the game hasn't started in over an hour.