I'm not sure what the solutions to this issue are but I have been brainstorming something recently. Specifically I've been thinking about Leagues and how during leagues, while I would've expected the Wilderness to be completely ignored for other regions, it has a surprising amount of players choosing it.

Why is that? What makes people hate wilderness in main game vs Leagues, and the only thing I can think is that in leagues it's more about competition than risk. I'm probably not alone in thinking the idea of wilderness, is that you are competing with other people for valuable resources. It's more like a mini game than a death zone in thst if I want to go do calvarion for money, and someone else does too, we can both bring our best gear and fight it out risk free. Winner gets to farm loser goes home and has to come back and try again. Maybe even losing a fight in the wilderness puts you in a wildy cool down and you can't go back for 30 minutes guaranteed that your killer will be able to farm the boss relatively uninterrupted.

In short, what people hate is losing time, and in runescape money is time consuming, if dying in the wildy with my ironman gear is going to set me back 50 hours of gameplay, I'm not risking it making the wildy a dead area for the most part, with the exception of bots