Force open conflict . Anyone can join, no one is judged by their threat.
I don't know how the matchmaking there was/is, but imo it's a better solution than "The only lasting solution that I can see is to launch 3.5, merge all the worlds, and finish implementing cross-district phasing, so that we can match players across all districts / regions. This will move all 8 players to the "best" district based on best ping and best tick time.".
Loading times are long as it is, in my eyes a bigger issue than dealing with dethreaters.
Work on bettering the matchmaking from there on out and while people are going to complain, because they will no matter what, at least it would be somewhat more fair and they wouldn't be intimidated by higher threats. IN A PERFECT WORLD of course...
Not to mention the whole thing would probably bug out like crazy + game crashes would increase drastically I feel like LMao if they were to actually do the merging thing and whatnot.