Welcome back
Population is lower these days. We've just come back after a 3 year hiatus (two of us) and are currently progressing through the content with a single group, totally from scratch. An old friend has also done the same and brought one of his friends with him.
We still have our T8 guild, but decided that we wanted to play from scratch (sans donations, something we always said we wanted to try). It'll be interesting to see how we do considering all the changes made to the raid tiers around the time we stopped playing.
I just finished reading through the round table discussion topic (which was active from the end of 2014 and March 2015) and it's obvious that, at that point, there were a lot of plans to make the "end game" content more appropriate for players who didn't box lots of toons. Quite a lot did change in the time we were away but I know development slowed due to Vaion having his own hiatus (he's back now, though

). Because of this, I don't know how much content is likely to come in the near future but we're a long way off with this current group anyway.
We stopped playing for lots of reasons, many due to RL. My personal reasons, relating to my enjoyment of the content, were because T8 bosses were becoming excessively time consuming to defeat. We were making progress, it's not like we hit a hard brick wall, but the time required to do a "boss run" was just far too intensive given my play time was becoming more limited. It was much less a boss run and more like "try to get one boss done at all".
As I said above, several changes have been made and I imagine it'd be easier these days but we're really happy just playing through from the start again.
It's a lot quieter now, definitely. I think the server population peaked around the time we last stopped playing (at least 150+ toons and I'm sure I saw it go above 200 at one point, though I wasn't playing then). My personal take on it is you can only keep players active with more suitable content and a lot of players probably hit their brick walls in T7 or T8, so I'm hoping that more "casual friendly" content will come soon (and maybe more 3.0s) to lure some players back.
It's still the best server and so much fun. The silver lining is there are fewer bottlenecks to progression due to lower competition. Which is helpful considering we don't have as much play time these days. That said, I'd be happier if the server was bustling because that's what it deserves.
There are still a few active players about.