I totally agree with everything above. Indeed it is very frustrating (at least for republic side, no idea about imperials) because we barely have 20 ppl of lvl50 online during prime time. Surely you can do ops / flash points / war zones, but with such limited amount of people it becomes nearly impossible.. To worsen the situation once players realize there're not many ppl around to do anything with, they quit / reroll, new ppl level to 50 but the total amount of lvl50s stays the same... (if not declining..).
Some of people from my guild have rerolled on another server (despite us being nearly the only guild doing hard mode ops), but more than half the population doesn't simply wanna waste another 10-20 days of playtime (i'm talking about /played time, not simply days passed).
Free server transfer / merge + paid server transfer to a server of our choice is desperately needed..