Yours is the first question/complaint I've seen in a while about bidding early. May have just been a fluke for this time of year. Starting in a month or so, as Christmas gets closer it will get worse. I've been on the forum when bids are not accepted at eBay in time to get recorded. Trust me, bidding early is the lesser of two evils.
Good idea about getting permission to bid early or notifying us, but in practice, most difficult... It’s been suggested before. Don't know just how they monitor traffic, but there have been a few hints. The monitoring is done in real time, so notifying you is out of the question since you can’t modify your bid in the last 2-3 minutes anyway. AS is also asked to look into the future about a minute, so there is also some guessing going on. They just guessed wrong. They will always be conservative and try not to take a chance of missing a bid.
The only advice I have, if you are going to be at your computer anyway, is manually snipe, (Let us know how you did), or stay away from those Sunday evening exact quarter hour auctions.
Good Luck.