Lots of areas go unused because they're either too remote for their vanilla xp-gain-here draw to be strong enough (think troll-caves) or they're too dangerous for their xp-gain-here effect to compensate (think Dregan's). I think that's probably acceptable for high level areas, but low level areas should all be pretty equal in terms of xp and items, shouldn't they be?
We definitely could use an influx of a dozen or so wizards in my opinion. Without active administration oversite I can see why this won't happen though. It'd really be nice to keep the dialogue going on what newbie wizarding projects could be.