Nearly no margin is neccessary to motivate those that seek The Best to choose it. If one spot is 1% better than the alternatives, *that's* where they'll be. There's no such thing as an almost-gold in the Olympics. One is the winner. Just like they don't play the first two bars of the silver medalist's national anthem, there isn't going to be a somewhat smaller crowd at the entrance to exp grinding's also-ran. A small adjustment making it not the best is all that's neccessary to completely empty the place out, because people had only one motivation for being there. The talk of casual players and availability and all that is crap. People did the monster missions because the rewards were wildly out of scale with the play required to obtain them. Monster missions still exist. People can STILL log on and join monster mission groups if they don't want to play their own characters. They don't, because they never really wanted to in the first place. Vocal minority aside, monster missions had their fifteen minutes because of imbalanced implementation. Novelty status is just right for them, and now that's where they are.
You seem to have enjoyed your in-game vacation from real Everquest (by real I mean virtual, what irony!), but it's time to head back into the real (repetetive twisting of language, I'm a wildman!) you.