Well the RPI 3 is quite a bit faster than the RPI 2. That might be it. I have switched all my RPI 2 to 3.
I have also bought the MPEG-2 license so i can use Hardware decoding.
Sorry thought you fixed your problem by setting a limit on days to load on the EPG.
I just wrote this now so you can basically see what I did. It's simple but it does the trick for me.
Download whatever guide(s) you want and then concatenate them together.
Just change as you need...
I fixed EPG problem on my own raspberry by splicing together 2 country EPG like you wanted to Kladde. I just wrote a simple bash script that does its job on autostart.