Low Population Servers: Pros and Cons

I decided last night to level engineering on my warrior. I know - I must be mad to level engineering, especially this close to an expansion release. The truth is that it's an upgrade to him. His professions before were skinning/herbalism and I don't have a leatherworker, so I figured that dropping skinning for something productive couldn't hurt.

I already have a miner (well, one maxed, and one in the 250ish range) so getting the materials to level it isn't that big of a pain.

I didn't last too long before that idea was thoroughly purged from my mind. I was at about 200 engineering when I couldn't find enough stone from the minerals I was getting to make the blasting powder in the quantity I need. So I went to the auction house to just buy the extra I needed. This is when I started cursing my lower population server. There were exactly 0 of the stones I needed up for sale.

Now don't get me wrong - normally I love not having to fight over every single herb and mineral. I love being able to complete quests without having to push and shove my way to the front of the line to talk to a quest giver, or wait for hours to kill X of a particular thing in an area.

But when I can't get something on the auction house because there just aren't any, or I can't find someone to craft something because the person who got that rare drop recipe hasn't been on in a couple weeks, it makes me feel helpless about the situation. Sure, I can go farm up the stuff I need to level engineering; that isn't a big problem. But what about when I want someone to make me a meta gem that's only a world drop? How do I get something that I can't go out and farm myself? A more ethereal quality to the problem is getting groups. There are times I feel like pugging (I know, but I consider it my charity work for the year) and I can't get a group. Even on my tank or healer.

The whole point of having a MMORPG is the MMO part of that. Massively Multiplayer Online. So supposedly, I should be able to play with hundreds or thousands (or more!) people at once. And they can be across the world from me. But low population servers, whether they serve multiple nations or not, don't deliver on the most important part of the title: Massively. We can tell it's the most important because it's the first word of the genre. And because it's the only thing that makes it different than, oh, Final Fantasy XXVII or whatever the next big console RPG is.

I'm not sure how to combat this. Do you trade the convenience of being able to do what you want when you want for the ease of obtaining tradeskills? This isn't a problem for me most of the time, but when it is a problem, it gets severely frustrating very fast.

I'm hoping we can see some improvements to this with WotLK with people returning to the game for ZOMG NEW CONTENTS AND STUFF, but what's the sustainable answer to low population servers? The current band-aid of high server->low server transfers apparently isn't working, and I don't think I can afford hundreds of dollars to transfer all my siblings characters somewhere else.