Just a reply over this excellent post by shah2014 (+1 due).
This would explain a lot of things. Everybody was expecting the processing times to be much faster with the CAP of NOC 2174.
However, we didn't saw that, the rate was kept the same. What we saw in the last few days was the 217x NOCs 20+ days ahead of the other NOCs.
This simply means the IT team of the CIO was kept on the same size as before, and therefore this NOCs went much faster.
In a few days they should finish the all the 217x NOCs but the 2172 and the team should hopefully be reassigned to other NOCs.
Finally, per the SS, the applications from the NOCs 1112, 2171, 2173 and 2174 accounted for almost 40% of the applications, so things should move much faster for everybody else once this NOCs are capped and everybody is reassigned.