I don't know if P99 really has the player base to afford to split their users like that. Most of their population is pretty heavily invested in the current server and is doing endgame Kunark etc, with Velious on the way soon. Dunno if they could pull enough of the Ragefire crowd to really justify another server.
Its funny to hear so many bag on freeport. When they did the re-design, all I could think of was "Who the fuck cares about freeport?", guess I was wrong. Maybe its server to server and who you picked as race. Like rathe used EC tunnel, no one hung out in FP and I was a gnome wizard, so once I got WC port I never saw FP again.