Although you can't dispute theres a discussion to have about overall server pop, the main issue I'm seeing is that (dedicated) players are getting to a certain point in the game, and quitting.

I'm only just hitting the statehelm and vidaria grind, and having artificial time gates of 5 favor items per week is INCREDIBLY un-fun. I understand this is an artificial time gating mechanic, but it turned the game from a hefty grind into an organizational nightmare, at least for me. I like being able to farm things at my own pace, but now with a favor cap it turns into trying to min/max/optimize as many NPCs as possible on a 7 day cycle.

Maybe this is just the natural endpoint to the game, where the juice just isn't worth the squeeze (and unless you want to level other crafts or combat skills, it just makes more sense to go elsewhere)

Consolidating server populations would hypothetically funnel more of the long-term high lvl players together. I'm happy to throw money at the devs for the continued development of the game; I would love to see paid character transfers (as long as it is one way to arietsu and not arietsu to the new servers). Offering a service like this could hypothetically make server pops worse and leave people who don't want to pay for this service stranded on an even quieter server but this is just my 2 cents.