I guess I don't really have a question, but I want to touch on something that you might be approaching from the wrong direction currently:
Concerning servers, server merges and character transfers, you seem inclined to keep the current state of regional servers with unique character databases. This is a flawed system to begin with and something which the original game was, iirc, supposed to handle differently.
Despite the difficulties Matt mentioned about merging character databases / transferring characters, your team should consider merging all characters onto one database and have districts hosted in different regions (e.g. Financial-EN1 (US), Financial-EN2 (UK), Financial-DE1 (GER), Financial-RU1 (RUS) and so forth).
This reduces the issue of a low playerbase in general, as well as low populations during off-time.
At the cost of lag, players could then chose districts/servers from a different region.