My vote goes to opening up the whole game to both sides, we are a fixed population of a resurrected old game, we are likely to never attract more players than we have now overall, our blueside players are our redside players and vice versa, apart from niche draws like SG's hosting redside nights or one player hosting SF's and trying to attract/advertise to blues no major switching will ever happen.
If everyone can go everywhere with no restrictions then our limited population can disperse or congregate wherever we like, make it so you can alignment switch from a selection tickbox in options menu so you dont even need to see null the gull. Yes this might all break the immersion factor but if thats what your after then you never need to switch and you can headcanon anything you want as to why your seeing heroes in Rogue Isles etc. RPers are pretty imaginative people after all.
I actually started playing in this universe because of CoV, i bought the game before i even had a PC that could play it, about 2 years after i was able to install it and enter into the world, i played villain until level 30 or so, always wondering where my SG mates were disappearing off to, then i realised that i had access to CoH too, made one hero and was blown away by how many people were playing on that side, suddenly stopped playing villains that much.
People dabble in CoV but it seems that they really want to be in CoH, its just the way it is, if you try and restrict people into doing what you want they will just walk away, you have to give them the freedom to do whatever they want and hope that they may come and play in your sandbox every once in a while, upping rewards will also have that effect, but only while those awards are available.
We have a much smaller team of volunteers compared to a paid staff from a major company running the game now, expecting full revamps or story rewrites or even new content written and created is unfeasible, however the idea of cherry picking the best player content and bringing into the game proper is a great one, starting to see the players as a resource that can be used to improve the game so that anyone can contribute and have their work voted on by the rest of the playerbase would be worthy of the essentially fan created project that we have here.
If the devs want to go that route that would be awesome, i just hope that they arent petty and want to rule the sandbox to the point that nobody else wants to play in it, after all there are lots of sandboxes out there.
Most of the defunct games that have been resurrected by a small group of people end up being changed to suit those peoples own playing needs/wishes and lose lots of players that were attracted to play the game that they missed when it was shutdown, i really hope that doesnt happen here, lets not become the next Return of Reckoning for example.