Why is Gamespy so crap?

Okay so i've followed the rules and purchased TWO copies of Red Alert 3 and this is what happened over Xmas 2008.

Christmas day - 3:00am - Played multiplayer co-op over the internet via Gamespy works fine.

Boxing day - 4pm CANNOT LOGIN!!! "Failed to Connect To Servers" error.

Now I have a few questions for all of you and EA:

1) Is Gamespy regularly failing when things get busy? If so why bother hosting the service? Why wont EA let me play over the LAN? I notice the illegal version of Red Alert 3 works over LAN?? Should I take my two legal copies back and get a refund and download the illegal version?

And before someone tells me to check ports and routers let me just inform you that I am Microsoft/Cisco engineer, you shouldn't need to be an engineer to operate GAMESPY!!!

Yes gamespy sucks. Maybe you should try if you could login to

your EA game account from another service to access multiplayer games over the internet.

Like The All Seeing Eye.