I wish that such amount of talks was equal to at least half a person making 3d development ;p Then i could play doctor Frankenstein and compose these people halfs into working developers.
But writing a post a litle more on topic. I agree that it is not a best idea to have a brand new city, while having little players populating the other already underpopulated cities ;p A heart of every multiplayer game focused on interaction is a big active player base. There are also certain aspects of the game which makes some points of interest more popular than the other and it is important to distribute these points equally all across the available world, to take advantage of the available space. It takes up some planning and then developing around that. I could write few pages on that topic and another few if i could be part of development team addressing this problem.
Anyway, the objective of this contest was to get people from the community, but not in the team and develop something. That something is a brand new city, because it is possible to develop such a thing without needing to know what the real dev team is actually doing.
For me, the city is really fun to make and allowed myself to attemp do everything the way i think it should be and partially show the dev team what is the good way to model a city like this one. Right now there are elements I'd do better if i knew back when we started, but we are all learning and so am I.
Also, a bit on the topic of the development other than art, well, i wish it was easy to share my advices, but i gues i let worry with that to someone else and i tick to what is easy, making this city ;]