majority of players on lamia are getting off around when you get online, so that may be the reason it seems empty to you, other than that, the main reason for the lack of progression based recruitment is most progression focused groups are done with the current raid content, since patch 2.5 didnt bring anything extra in terms of progression (or even possible BiS changes), so there is more than likely a lot of people that are only raid logging by now.
as for starting up your own fc, it become rather difficult to start a new fc about a month after 2.0 release, and then again about 2-3 weeks after ps4 version was released, just because the majority of players want a well established fc to join to start with.