Factions are important and bring out a lot of fun. Without them, there would be a huge lack of organized roleplay. Even if you don't like to roleplay, a roleplay environment is still good for making sure the factions play properly. Kind of like a red team and a blue team, except with a hell of a lot more teams. Nobody likes a teamkiller.
However, they also cause a lot of problems. Most officials think themselves better than any indies. As soon as an unofficial faction sprouts up, no matter how good the idea is, most of the time it will start getting mashed by every official faction there is. I've helped a lot of different small factions and tried to help them pull through, but official factions that aren't even enemies with their NPC faction even went completely out of their zone of influence to blow up their base and kill them on sight.
It's funny, they say all indies are lolwuts as their excuse, but officials are often the lolwuts...