You raise an important point. If neither model can explain everything and beat the other clean it's because there is more to it and we have to go beyond 3d thinking. I thought about it and have made a little picture to illustrate my proposition.

It was done in 5 mns on basically paint and is just to convey an idea it is not meant to be accurate or precise nor take into account all the contention points, just the geography thing. We have to keep in mind that it's just a base and i don't consider the map correct either in shape, size or location of landmasses. The flight routes can also be misleading because of no flight zones we don't know of that prolong a trip unnecessarily.

Now with that said here's the picture followed by the explanation : https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/538506928847061042/1136689133188821062/FE_Map_corrected.jpg

So the issue here is that all the red distances are supposed to be more or less similar (12-14h). In yellow is a relocation of Australia that would solve the Chile flight problem but it would break stuff on the other side and is not plausible. My solution is not conventional, it postulates that the huge parts of the ocean that are empty actually don't exist and act as a portal instead where you relocate instantly in another area (illustrated by the orange arrows going through the black grids). Of course if you don't believe or are willing to contemplate the idea that we are living in a simulation you can stop right here and go back to whatever you believed until now. So these areas being non populated means they don't have to be rendered and like in any computer game, areas nobody sees are not calculated to save ressources. It might be some Bermuda triangle thing on a larger scale, Dead Zones or could be part of the prison system we reside in to portal you from edge to edge seemlessly. Anyway just sharing some ideas for whoever will find them interesting.