my two cents on this...
I have a gut feeling that AHV needs an option to be switched off if the user wishes. The reason being is that with the release of 1.09 all of a sudden everyone in the arena is "forced" to use it by default. What this does I think is that it puts extra work on the servers, while before those who wanted to use AHV had a choice, leaving the servers alone.
I am no expert in how things are configured on the HTC end, but we are seeing more lags lately. Some people attribute that to more players online, some people attribute it to AHV. If HTC feels that this lag can be taken care of by putting newer server or providing a switch to turn AHV off completely to free up the server...