only way to truly know if you are correct is to test both pages with the EXACT same content. I honestly believe your static page is much more SE friendly with conent and KW's then you dynamic page that you show above. That is the reason for the IMHO for your increased traffic. I could be wrong though...and its just an opinion.
It is not in every case. The static page has advantage over dynamic since the content can be optimized much easier than dynamic. The most important part is not whether it is static or dynamic but because of your internal linking changed in my opinion.
what i'm comparing here is blog's frontpage: static vs dynamic, the winner is clearly static, the number of search queries has consistently increased over the past few weeks.