So, in talking to people and browsing the new player forums, it seems there are about 5 populated servers, and the rest are barren wastelands, devoid of anyone except the occasional unfortunate soul who made a character without checking the forum first.

Take a look at any thread on servers, and you'll see everyone wants to be on the bigger server. No exceptions. They don't care if they have to wait until 4 AM to log in, they want those server numbers.

If everyone is just going to cram into the highest population server anyway, why bother having other servers?