We used to have this issue back on PC #1502 as well, and it was extremely frustrating not being able to get on and defend against purges or reconnect after a connection hiccup left your character and thrall logged-out in a dangerous place.
As I’ve suggested before, the mechanism that hides full servers really needs to be retooled so that it instead hides over-crowded servers, but only to those who lack a level on them. This also need to be the default setting when the server browser is opened.
In this way, people who have been playing on a server would still be able to see it when it’s over (say) 75% full, but folks who are just starting out would not. In this way, it would help to spread out the population of new players to other servers so that there might be a few most-popular servers for a regional game type instead of just 1 or 2.
The reward for building a positive community that helps retain players (e.g. like the old-timers did on 1502) should not be that you’re effectively locked out of the game for long periods of time. The Officials as a whole may be “free”, but that doesn’t change the fact that some people have invested 1000s of hours into particular servers community-building and protecting them from griefers.
So while two people may have an equal right to play on the Officials as a collective, I’d agree with the OP that there’s a problem when the time-investment of someone who has been around forever is preempted by someone with no time-investment, especially when a little bit of coding magic with filters on the server browser could avoid such a problem in the first place.