Well, there are advantages and disadvantages for joining new and old server. Frankly, unless you are willing to drop obscene amount of money into the game, if you wish to play competitively, you kinda have to join a new server. I don't even know how much it will cost to get to 60k power within 2 month, and 60k power is what top ftp in old servers are going to be in 2 month.

That said, personally I think they should open new servers semi-frequently with a pre-planned merge schedule. So the effect is that they can open 10 servers per month per region, but a few month later, those 10 servers become 1 automatically. This is in ADDITION to regular merger for older/deader servers. The ideal equilibrium is that they can open a server per region every few days while the total number of server per region stabilize to 20-50.