@Titus @KiolLman @Zed38 I invite you all step out of your conspiracy theories for a minute and into a new player's experience. You just bought the game and log in, you don't like PVP from bad experiences in other games and decide to try out PvE. You load on to the server and arrive on a beach. You start running around and the starve alert goes off, you make a campfire and try to place it... to close to another player's foundation. You go up over a hill and as far as you can see Pillars all around a huge base. Or maybe you spawn in and you are inside of or under someones base. Behemoth gates surrounding you. You try to figure out how to get out and can't. You can't harvest enough stuff to make anything to level, you can't figure the maze out to get out, you probably don't even realize that you should get out because you're new to the game. You starve to death and respawn in another spot, again surrounded by gates, but this time they have left signs telling you to go up the stairs and through the greenhouse. You go and start trying to build a hut to stay the night. You can't place a foundation/campfire/sleeping bag anywhere because its all pillared. The current PvE servers are full of this and I've experienced both (also been spawn locked literally inside of someone's gate so I couldn't even move, trouble tickets do nothing for the stack of bodies stuck in the gate).
The new servers may get there, but at least those trying the game out in the beginning will have a chance to build and explore. If you're concerned about your server then talk to the people on there and see if they are leaving or not. Do something to make the server inviting to new people. Or just stop playing for a few weeks and wait for new servers and quit whining about it on the forums. New PvE clusters are necessary and I have no fears of the existing servers I play on going away.
You also may want to go read the Kotoku article where they claim Wildcard was ready to announce a complete launch and had a change of mind, instead deciding to go with a data transfer to new infrastructure supporting better network security and server performance. The legacy servers will be just fine resource-wise, you can put your tinfoil hats away. The trade market may or may not bloom, but that it up to people the run the trade markets and what they want to do. If your server has an average 10 online, that is nowhere near the status of "remained near-zero for an extended duration of time" and I doubt you will need to be concerned.