It's about ruining the idea of the server. Battlescape wouldn't be oldschool server anymore.
Don't think PRE-EOC content would increase player count at all, most likely it would just downcrase. The playercount has nothing to do with the ingame content in my opinion. The problem is on the toplists, we are #14 on Runelocus. For such low position in the toplists the player count is quite big.
Nowadays every single server bots their votes up on the toplists and Battlescape doesn't seem to be doing so.