Looking forward to doing crystal tower and working on housing myself, but I'm iffy about whether it'll be enough to hold us over till 2.2. Hopefully housing is really in depth and takes alot of time, or i'll be back to twiddling thumbs waiting for the next update

As for the population, it's pretty easy to see that the majority of people are at endgame already, simply looking at the zone density and dungeon timers clears that speculation up. The only lower level zones that are getting any action are the ones people are using to fate grind alts up, and dungeon timers for pre-50 dungeons are easily twice as long as endgame ones.

That shows 1 of 2 things
1. Fate grinding is completely out of control and even newbies are doing them to level their first class(unlikely)
or
2. Everyone is at endgame and just using them to grind alts up.