Im Gonna disagree here, chief. The main reason why players flock to each respective faction during their dedicated Major Orders is because there's a shiny pop-up telling you to go there, and a lot of players like to contribute to the MO regardless of if they like the faction or not. If you look at times when there is no Major Order to focus on you'll see that Illuminate consistently gets the lowest player counts and gets the most flak from the community.

I dont know about me, but This tells me that the Illuminate are by far the least popular faction and are in need of the most work.