If you want the opinion of someone who doesn't know a ton about the endgame landscape of p99 (I've been around forever, since beta I guess, but always been "casual." I mostly played a different eqemu game - Shards of Dalaya) but played on Vallon Zek a lot in this era (Kunark/Velious) and own a top-3 finish title in a BotB, here's my maybe worthless thoughts:
PvP on live was awesome. I loved it. Yeah it is wildly unbalanced and clearly the game was not designed with PvP in mind, but that's fine. It was still some of my greatest memories in EQ, particularly in Velious when there were real consequences to PvP. For example, evils on Vallon Zek controlled Temple of Veeshan for a long time. It was of utmost importance we never got wiped out, otherwise we would get LNS'd. We had euro crews watching overnight, we'd have to have scouts out and mobilize in case awful xteaming goods were gonna hit ToV. I had to leave my main logged out in ToV and play a retired friends char fulltime for several months due to it. So on and so forth. On the other hand, Sebilis was notably controlled by neut/goods, among others. Unless you xteamed, you simply did not get Seb loot easily as an evil. JBB, Trakanon, Fungi tunics.
We had zero rangers/druids/paladins/bards. They had every class. It was awesome, it made for a great sense of community. PvP had huge, sweeping effects to the PvE landscape. There were heroes and villains. Reputation was everything. No one needed to advertise on the PvE boards. We didn't need yellow text to know who was the best, or to know when to LnS. The playerbase was judge, jury, and executioner. I knew if I zoned into Sebilis on a rogue mission and died, I was likely not getting my corpse back for maybe several days.
Some say the community in blue doesn't compare favorably to live because it feels like everyone is a mercenary and only cares about themselves, there is less sense of togetherness or need to progress as a cohesive unit. If most players could freely choose to either A) Add a new, skilled, epic'd player to their guild or B) Get their alt that epic, I think it's clear what most would choose. Not saying all, but most. (To be fair, with Velious on the horizon this is probably less true, and understandable in a stale, top heavy Kunark environment. This doesn't even necessarily reflect my thoughts, it's a direct paraphrase of a complaint I saw someone else post awhile back.)
To me, Red is along those lines, but the PvP version of it. When I saw the yellow kill text, I got the impression that this probably wasn't the server I was looking for, and when I found out one giant guild controlled ALL of the raid targets, I was had to accept the fact it just wasn't for me. I wanted to like Red. In fact I've essentially resigned myself to the fact that it's not possible to recreate that type of atmosphere we had on VZ. I mean, where else could you kill Sirken and get away with it? I realize Teams PvP was different, but even compared to Rallos the same overarching "complaints" stand. I say "complaints" because I don't think it necessarily is right or wrong or better or worse, or that it invalidates Red, just that it appeals to a different, probably smaller, crowd.
Again, I loved PvP on live, and I was far from a filthy casual. I will never, ever forget great memories like endlessly trolling unnamed xteam guild outside of Sebilis til they amassed 20+ teams to chase our war/shm/enc trio all the way across Kunark, trying to isolate and pick them off one by one. The thrill of blind whip proc'ing and seeing if they were smart enough to be able to pot it off blinded. The feeling of being down 10% to 40% then dropping a massive triple attack for a come behind victory. The us-against-them mentality and teamwork we had to develop. I could give a million other examples. And I'm sure you guys love Red and I have nothing against folks who play Red, I'm just trying to illustrate why people may be turned off by it.
Adding to the fact that hardcore PvE people may be turned OFF by lower competition on mobs like Verina Tomb, not attracted. I don't think that is the problem people have with blue. I dislike variation and duck-interrupting and recharging and
this atrocity as much as the next guy, but weighed against the downsides of Red, the low pop being one of them, it kind of became a choice between the better of two evils.
It seems the simple fact is that the audience for a non-teams, PvP-with-little-consequence server is just not that large. I may be completely wrong. I'm just trying to offer my thoughts, as someone from a decent PvP background on live, who desperately longs for a worthwhile PvP scene.