In general I agree to the need to have a single document based meeting with different start and end times for a meeting that takes longer as a single day (24hours). But what happens if one of the participants couldn't attend for the first or last day (session). Maybe there is a smarter way than a more than 24 hours meeting (I also would assume to have some none busy time or a nap during the night).
Wouldn't it be possible to make a several day meeting with different time slots per day/session and the option for the attendees/invitees to accept,decline ... all days/session or single ones?

I totally agree to the need to have a smarter usage of WAN connected infrastructures. This feature ("closest server first") should also be available for the replication (pane) of the client too. So far we have to configure each location per user (location document, icon stack and replication settings).