Honestly, what I see going on with eBay for the past few months - massive backend upgrades or entire swaps which are being done incrementally and piecemeal. In that process, eBay is forced to make certain concessions to keep the live eBay service running, but is having a negative impact on visibility at times. It seems eBay is running two different server clusters, one is a mirror and the other the live, but the mirror is only fractional of the live. It seems they're doing modifications to the mirror, onlinging it for a period for testing, then switching back to the live. Seems to be that they're doing this to various modules of the backend OS, such as just with the search at times, or just with the payment processing, etc.
All of this amounts to the illusion that eBay is throttling us as the fractional mirroring, which is likely being done for categories and sorting/filtering sub-categories, will only contain a portion of the relevant listings. IE - for "best match", the depth of the cache is limited to those who place in the top 0.5% of the top in the Listing Quality Report. Or, IE - the lowest priced 2% of listings for the Low to High sort.
Of course, what I'm saying is purely speculative, but over the past 20 years I have talked to many former eBay employees and they had explained that certain site improvements were impossible without a complete remake of the engine behind eBay due to poor coding. And, now, I'm suddenly seeing some of these upgrades come to fruition, such as 24 photos in a listing, among others, which were previously stated to be an impossibility with the previous backend 'OS'.
That's my two cents. I still don't like what eBay is doing with promoted, among other things, but I also am very optimistic that eBay is finally putting the massive amount of resources it has to good use and taking on the impossible task of fixing the tether that has kept it from advancing for so long.
In the meantime, be aggressive if you're struggling. Make sure you're selling desirable items. Make sure you're priced as competitive as you can. Make sure that you don't waste opportunities to move your merchandise. Source more items in less saturated categories. List good quality items and irresistible prices, be aggressive with offers, and force sales. When eBay is on, it's still on. But when it's off, like yesterday and the day before, it's time to take advantage of that traffic you had over the previous days and force the issue.
That's my best advice. Stay the course. eBay will likely be better than it ever has been in the future.
If I'm anywhere in the ballpark of what's actually going on behind the eBay scenes, then they can't be transparent about it. So, I must speculate and this is my best approximation. Best of luck to you all!
