It's a reasonably argued point of view, far more so than the usual 'rants' about shard mergers, but it still strikes me as aiming time and effort at the wrong problem....
I disagree with that pretty strongly. It makes no increase to the population of the game, it just makes certain ghettoes within the game more densely populated by levelling some others, and the core of the problem surely is the lack of population overall, not a level on any given shard?
I still remain convinced the basic problem is total playing population, and getting that back to healthy levels across the whole game. Shard merging and shuffling would be expending a lot of time and energy in Broadsword covering over the problem instead of the absolutely vital requirement of resolving it.
The main, central and overriding thing needed for the future 'good of the game' is more players, shard mergers does nothing practical towards that aim - rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, and chucking a few overboard, is not going to make any difference to anything except to those passengers being pissed off that their chair is gone....
From my viewpoint, what would be good for the game is rules enforcement, sorting out all the gaping 'security holes' that allow the continued duping of items, resolving the utter absence of any worthwhile new player 'experience', incomprehensible systems, the balance between so many effectively useless skills and far fewer really important ones, overcomplicated equipment assembly (in making things, and building suits, and interlocking properties and skills over all your equipment), prompt and effective customer support in-and out of game.... sort out those, which are utterly fundamental, before tinkering with the rest, please. Make it a pleasant, engaging, and FUN way to spend time, and make it much more possible for new players to experience that from the start.
Building a game that people actively want to play should be the only target in view. Do that and you can bring more people in. Nobody is going to be induced to come play UO because fewer shards with more people makes them go 'whoa, that was what held me back all these years'. People who have left UO have not all left because of graphics, or systems, or billing, or getting older, or real life issues, or other games or even combinations thereof - the real fundamental reason any people stop playing a game is it stops being enough fun to keep playing. Surely that has to be what any effort by the devs and Broadsword is directed at. Making a slowly declining game decline a bit more slowly by shuffling the players about is really not doing anything at all to solve the problem, and is more likely to shrink the playerbase then expand it.