It's difficult to make any sort of judgement about LSs right now. Since the launch of XIV there has been chaos with LSs. Either no admin tools or fail of launch then no content then no people as more left. Then there's always holidays 2010 & 2011 saw large fluxes in people leaving with new games out and just being away from the game, some think to themselves, "Why do I want to go back right now? I'll just wait till the new patch." They either return or disappear.

Our LS purposefully is waiting for the merge to repearl. With no admin tools we have 70 people "in" our LS we haven't seen in months as well as subs taking place; we just felt it better to wait before repearling and then possibly having to have to do it again.

Otherwise, I think the rest of the OP is a matter or terminology rather than it's right or wrong. Yes the words merge and transfer ARE technically different but I'm pretty sure 99.9% of us who incorrectly say merge mean transfer. Basically, we need to get smaller pop server players to move to larger server worlds in order to bring more of the community together while also shutting down defunct servers and saving a few bucks. <----That sound better than "merge"?