For starters, stop all the daisy-chaining stuff. Build a tree of switches. Connect your router to the top of the tree (i.e.
The core). That's your problem right there. This will help a great deal by itself.
Within a given site, if you've got a reasonable switch topology, everything will improve dramatically, at 100M or 1G, either way. You're going to have better performance & latency going to 1G, but it's probably not going to be earth-shattering, if your client systems are just doing normal, average stuff on the network. From what you describe, you've got users going through 4 or 5 switches.
That's just bad. For inter-site traffic - what's the latency like over that VPN? How's the bandwidth utilization on the link?
Those will tell you what you're looking to figure out right there.
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.