Why is the community population declining?

[Ingenious]

Also, Ingenious: SRP and Official Faction request costs? For an Official Faction this tends to be relatively minor as the cost is spread over all people. You can make 50M inside an hour easily - doing it with a group of say, 5 people means you need to play 2 hours to get that amount together (10 hours total playing time dedicated to the faction's creation). And, if the faction succeeds, you can request a CAU8 armor once it's established (see faction rules) - so you actually end up in the plus.
SRPs carry this cost because a lot of folk fired off a "gimme battleship on pirate ID" kind of requests, and frankly, the admins have better things to waste their time on then half-serious requests. Most of the SRPs I've seen passing the list can easily be handled with a standard ID, or a slightly different ship.

The point is not the cost, the point is the focus on the reward and not the experience. Even in your response, you bring up the CAP8 reward. But what is the reward, really, it is just an unsigned integer in the server database. The important thing is the roleplay experience and fun. Some factions, SRPs, people, etc. think rewards are more important. You admins do a good job filtering it, but still, it's a symptom of the problem.