If I'm not mistaken. That is exactly the reason cryptic kind of give up the idea. for sure, they could just make a big map and limit the population on a level the server could handle. But they justified that this would make the galaxy feel unpopulated.

My personal opinion: I think less populated galaxy is better. Space is empty. The enterprise didn't find another starfleet vessel while running around. Usually when they found another ship, is because it was emitting a distress call or the captain of the other ship has called or something like this.

And the OP has a point. Slipstream right now is sometimes a wasted ability. The ideal solution would be the map merge. We would not waste it so much and aslo we would face a lot less loading screens. Specially the DOFFers. But to reduce cooldown on the slipstream would already improve things.

How about a compromise instead of 1 large map merge have all the various factions as individual blocks rather than the whole galaxy, so a fed block, klink block, rom block etc and open it up with invisible walls that they put on ground maps to stop klinks going into sirrus / heart of fed space and vice versa which still retains diplo immunity, should be less stressful on the servers than 1 large map whilst still keeping space relatively populated...

That doesn't really fix much. Klinks don't have much space, Fed is huge, and it's still blocking direct Point-A to Point-B warp. I appreciate the feedback, though.