I have highlighted in bold the section of your post that is most important. Right now, there are issues with the web wallet. I am not sure how the mobile wallet is working. I know very well that the command line daemon syncs well with the network. I have received coins that I have mined to my CLI wallet. But as you mentioned, this is not the crowd that ETN is targeting, so at this moment they are not doing a great job with their target audience, who want to use either the mobile or web wallet to transfer their ETN funds.
AFAIK, the current mobile "wallet" is actually not a wallet at all, but a wallet interface. the actual wallets and blockchain nodes are on their servers, the app just communicates with their servers telling them what transactions to conduct. It's a centralized system working on top of a decentralized one. That's why it's laggy and slow. The solution is quite simple. If they just alter the app so that it connects to the blockchain directly and not through their servers it would work as well as the cli wallet is right now. No need to upgrade their servers at all.
Not sure why they went with this haphazard setup.