While being able to switch at any time would be great, most intelligent people know it would be heavily abused. Hitech has set it at 12 hours because "that is how it was before the dual arenas", and that is what his experience told him works, but that was back then, this is now.
Like the problem when they had 2 late war arenas a compromise was reach to allow the Euro players to have a single arena to have a better playable population. The players of years ago were more squad orientated, team orientated as such they didn't switch much. Fights could be had over "fighter town" (yes we had those). Gv battles happened at many spawn points as they were often used to capture bases, as well as at Tank Towns (yes we had and USED them too). Bombers hit strat, and coordinated with fighters to hit towns/fields to aid in captures.
In todays game play style is much different. Fights are harder to come by unless you like flying in a horde, or against one. With the new strats the bombers are back, but a couple months ago how many buffs did you see in the air? Not many. If hitting starts STAYS popular you may see fighters attacking them more which will bring out the defensive fighters which will create a fight. If the players give up on the strats as they are un-important to rolling bases the game will be right back where it was a couple months ago.
So yes the game is much different than it was back then when 12 hours was the way to go, maybe it's time to revamp that logic. Maybe it's time to compromise and drop it to 3 or 4 hours. I don't remember wild swings in side switching for the month or two that we still had the 1 hour switch time and the single arena, but I don't have the data that Hitech has.