With the server merges, there were a lot of people who made "name saving" characters (a hurriedly-made lvl 1 that wasn't played once they were past character creation) on the destination servers. There's nothing wrong with that except that many of these "temporary" characters still exist and are still lvl 1 months later. It's rather obvious that they are not coming back any time soon so why should they still hold that name slot that others had to give up?
My proposal:
1) After 3 months of inactivity on the part of a character (not account) a check is made
2) If the character is still lvl 1, it is renamed by the system with a placeholder name (like when the servers were merged)
The 3 month window should ensure that people who genuinely want to save a name for future use can still reasonably do it. At the same time, this would still free up quite a few names from people who have no intention of using them. If the account owner later returns, there's nothing stopping them from changing the name back to what it was provided no one else has claimed it in the mean-time.
The Level 1 criteria also limits the scope of this to those accounts unlikely to be played again. (It takes what, 5 minutes to make lvl 2, if that?)
Why is this important? Some people had entire character backgrounds written up around their character's name(s) and were very attached to it. When the merges happened, some of them were forced to rename their character(s) because the name(s) were already taken by name-saver characters. As of this time, some of those characters are still lvl 1 and on the starting planet so they clearly have not been played in the last few months.
I'm one of those players and am willing to start a brand new character to regain the name but it's not possible currently. I'm sure some people will be upset over this but hopefully it's reasonable enough to get an honest look.