It is somewhat confusing that they don't tell us what was patched, but this is somewhat of a predicament. They have to choose one time to update everything, or they have to lock players out of the servers intended for other regions. I have yet to see a game that will allow you to play on a server that is running a different version than your client. The issue at hand is when it makes sense to shut the servers down most. One might assume they're trying to affect the smallest portion of the player base, but that may not be BW's reasoning at all. In my experience, during the week my server dies a little earlier in the night than they shut it down. Maybe later in the game's life, they'll find a time of day that will just cut into every region's lighter hours. Unfortunately there's really no logical way for them to compromise other than moving maintenance to a different time, but still have the same time for every server. TBH, they really can't even decide to lock servers by region now that people have made characters out of their region. The one possibility for this to happen that I can think of is allowing mass character transfers, which still doesn't account for the guilds that would have to break up. In order to allow people to play in the community they favor, they're forced to have this system that seems bound to always make someone unhappy.
It's really up to personal choice whether you can deal with that or not. You have no obligation to be alright with it being like this, but there is logic and not just favoritism involved in this model, if you look at it objectively. We can only hope that BW's eventual goal is to make as many people happy with their game as possible, as should be the goal of every developer seeking to create a long-term, large scale audience.
EDIT: Fixed a typo.