I think the reason the top servers have all the players, is due to the community and how they handle new upcoming servers. I've heard stories of new servers being attacked, hacked, tormented and pushed back down so they can not reach the top. The top server owners/team do this to keep all the $ for themselves. Not to mention new developers have a hard time receiving help, If they do usually they are paying heavy for it, and half the time the person providing the service will sabotage the server. I have even caught a guy who did services on my server a while back implementing something that would allow spawning in a secret location, He would later log on and spawn items and sell them to my players under the table or ruin your economy ruining your server, I found out about this from a player who was honest enough to report it, I looked into it and found out what was allowing this and it was pretty sneaky, for an experienced developer would be easy to find but if your new could easily over look it.