Yea, this is not good and needs to be fixed. I don't want to go into the character creation (On a side note the character creation is also done poorly) every time I start up the game to check which of the three servers i am playing on (one per faction) is sufficiently populated... Any word on this by the devs to be tweaked? Edit: And yes I know this doesn't suit this sub forum, but there was no "Suggestions" sub forum.
I think that server "population" you see is the total number of characters on the server - not representative of the current online players. Would like to know for sure if that is true or not though.