I've said it before, Recruit-a-Friend should allow bypassing of character creation restrictions. Especially when ALL of NA is restricted during primetime.
That thing you can look on reddit and find 50 codes for? Hows something thats freely available for anyone to use going to solve the problem?

We really needed 2-3 servers per datacenter to be added when they merged and separated us, but we didnt get it, so we're all kind of stuck. To be fair, we didnt get it because the odds are exceptionally high it would have just meant 10 aether servers were congested instead of 8, but if you look at how the JP datacenters work, its an OBVIOUS need in NA (JP has 8 more servers for HALF the total population)