1. It'll be almost impossible to end up on an even lower populated server when you're axing servers and those players are being condensed into even fewer servers with 2-3k+ (I believe?) range per server they wanted at present time.

2. This will indeed hurt the inactive people, but that's just it, this right now is for people currently playing as it's being done in order "to improve player experience", not necessarily improve the image of the game (even though that can happen with a merge though.)

3. This is inevitable in any MMO, especially one not created by your native language development team.

What will happen with the first idea, is the global servers will become unbalanced because everyone will try to flock and fill up language specific servers, which you then successfully created problem #1 by trying to segregate people.