I personally don't see how adding more wards for each housing is considered as bad for players than do good. But I suppose that's rather more self entitlement privilege than actually making excuse about server congestion claimed by players.

We have way too many lower populated servers, and at this point - they could just merge or not make any more servers and instead focus on the servers that require extra capacity to help players who are currently residing to have housing too.

Balmung is not congested anymore, and Mateus is no longer preferred - and these populations are always either growing or maintaining at average. There are always people fighting over plots, and devaluation times affect them from getting even one plot.

Just make a lot of wards at this point and deduce the devaluation. Making more servers as comparing to making more wards and capacity size of current server seem like there isn't any beneficial to the new low populated server community.

WoW merged and FF11 did too. I don't see any problem here.