I've also built a script that does this (copies custom amis to the 4 regions we operate in, if missing), and I bet thousands of others have written similar tool

I've also built a script that does this (copies custom amis to the 4 regions we operate in, if missing), and I bet thousands of others have written similar tools. Similarly, every cloudformation/terrform/etc config has a region-to-ami lookup involved, because they get different ids in each region. AWS could do something that takes a tiny fraction of the collective effort applied, and make all that work unnecessary. Having amis globally available once uploaded, with zero extra work, would be nice. I'm okay with the first launch in a new region taking an extra few seconds while it copies over for the first time.