I'm pleasantly surprised by CLG's success so far - although they do have plenty of time to drop back down to 4th.
However, I do find it puzzling that EU was expected to do well. It's strong teams last year were kind of in recovery - Fanatic lost 3 starters from its 18-0 season so Immortals as much last year's Fanatic than this year. And while much has been made of G2's vacation causing some sloppiness, I feel like a lot of those problems were pretty much there already. Some of their plays had the same kind of slightly disjointed feel, they just weren't punished as hard when stuff went wrong, or managed to get away with it. Against stronger teams, more of those little cracks in a team's play are going to get leveraged into big looking gaps. Moreover, it seems to me that EU often leans hard on 1-3-1 strats, which have not seemed to be working well in this tournament. Teams have been pretty good about forcing objectives as five, and have been willing to take straight up brawls without needing to arrange some favorable collapse first.
So both in terms of current versus historical strength, and playstyle matching up to how the tournament is being played, EU kind of seems at low ebb ATM.
OTOH, people love throwing extreme terms like garbage, joke, etc. G2 didn't do well. But they still had some good plays, and some close losses. In fact, a lot of the games this tournament have been close. Even the IWC team, while losing, looked pretty good doing so. None of these top teams look like jokes. Underperforming relative to elite teams from other regions is a long way from bad.
Of course, pool seeding doesn't seem like that big of a deal for a team that actually wants to contend for Worlds. They will need to beat the top teams anyway, so while they might have to give away more, they will still need to take down those 1st place seeds. It's only if a team is more trying to place well than win that seeding is critical.
