im sorry for wasting your time.
Apology accepted.
What you don't know is that until the day after I posted this thread, I didn't
have the ability to sort by ping.
I got some updates by connecting to an empty balance website: the "Play" page now has 4 options, not 3; I can turn the brightness back up from that page*; and, sort by ping actually works, now. It never did, 'til I got this little bit of new code. I could sort by map, number of players, "alphabetically" by server name (if 'square' is a letter), both ascending & descending, show/hide both empty and full servers, but I could not sort by ping (supposedly updated in 1.2 iirc, so, no worries).
I have the Mac port, and also whatever I either autoDL, or grab from nearby servers (map files for playability). Now that I can sort by ping, you're right, this thread is moot. I thought that maybe people who still couldn't might find it useful. And you and _Eq_ were having a fine old time discussing it, so I left it up here. I wonder if Rekov had the same issue...
*MacBook's f1&f2 (dim/bright) disabled in-game, but not f3-f5 (mute/soft/loud). Made Trem frustratingly dark. Plus the brightness would get turned way down every time Tremulous was run. After playing, my brightness would be at like 3 out of 15. Darkmap areas were murder for unseen headchomp. I've got it too bright now, until I play through all the defaults a couple of times. There's a spot on Arachnid I have to look for before I crank it back down from maximum. As always, thanks for your support.