Take my opinion for a grain of salt as it has been forever since I really played but..

With the lower player base, CF needs to consolidate a few of its features. When you had 100+ players (I remember hitting the hard cap a at least once a week where you had to wait to log in) growing and expanding was smart.

Cabals: going from 6 primary cabals (knights/Shadow, Masters/Battle, Entropy/Arbiters) to a multitude of spec cabals was logical. You needed more to spread out the player base and allowed a whole new experience and RP. However now with such a low player base, perhaps the cabals need to be reduced again. Nothing sucks more then playing a char and actually getting in a cabal and then you spend hours by yourself. It defeats one of the social aspects of the game.

Areas: Again it use to be you had to fight to rank in areas, so it was necessary to create and spread out new areas. However now there are so many it makes it very hard to hunt people. Solution and not saying it wouldnt be a pain in the ass) a modification of the where command. You have "regions" in which you do "where" and it will only show names of people in your region. If you want the room, you must be in the area for it to act as where is now.

Imms and religions, and misc: Addressing empowerment was a great solution which allows people to play the classes and then get the extra juice as their Imm pops on. However perhaps create a few "generic" religions/gods that fit a few roles in which no one Immortal controls but can do so under the generic alias.
The new crop which I have seen seem to be great and I really enjoyed talking to the former Battle Bard :p He has a good head on his shoulders and will do great.

The game is a huge time investment and I really dont know how you can fix that part. A lot of little changes has helped from what I can see so who knows. A major problem CF has is that it now competes with a wide varity of online gaming not only from Computer systems, but all the other platforms.

But..thats just my observation