The only time I remember getting 500 AA "a night" in THJ was when the alt catchup mechanic was in full swing while blowing up PoFire powerleveling alts and slowly leveling gear. On my first character, when I was finally able to pull half of DN at a time, it was still around 50 - 70 AA an hour. Before I was able to swarm pull, while leveling up on my first toon and getting the 300 - 500 AA at the recommended level 30 break, I was probably averaging 25 - 35 AA per hour while crawling through the various zones fighting 5 -15 mobs at a time (heavily zone and AA level dependent; Guk & Dulak for lower levels then Nadox & DN at higher levels).
For those that didn't play THJ, the server added all the AA you had, across all toons then gave a bonus XP percent on AA points depending how far away the toon you were playing was from the total. So if you had 1000 AA on each of your 5 toons, any toon you played was getting something like 300% increased AA XP because they were all sitting at 1000/5000 AA.
Also, to reiterate, after the big push of getting the first toon set up, I kept played THJ through the xpacs because it was like Diablo in leveling speed/gearing. Being done with each EQ xpac nostalgia run in two to four weeks (like D3/D4 seasons) was exactly what I was looking for, not some game I could endlessly play. I did the old school EQ grind decades ago, I have no interest in doing it again.