I'm a pretty new player so maybe I can give my thoughts from a different perspective:
Personally, I think there should be a change to cooldowns to something similar like Unloze. I know the main population is from Europe, but there is also players from Asia and North /South America. I think this is when the population suffers the most because all the popular maps have already been played so we're stuck playing unpopular maps, causing less players to join, stay and actually play the game. I can't tell you how many times I've seen the server play Nemesis and Shroom for the past couple of nights. And most of the time I see the same maps with low cooldown being played and don't even bother to join the server (I'm sure a lot of ppl can relate too). I've also had a friend who complained about not being able to play Minas in over a month. We would nominate a good popular map but people worry too much about "wasting " it, so we go to a different map and lose players when we could have gained players.
I think a change to cooldown can encourage EU players to stay up later (if they can) and also encourage players in different time zones to also come and play. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing both laser and defending maps but most times we can't play these good maps, so we resort to others. I have stayed up late to play maps with a large population, so I am sure that EU players will also stay up to play if the map is right.