because Paid transfers are big $$$$$$.

They're much more content slowly letting realms die off and/or fill up, because paid transfers are a zero effort $25 profit.

They offer the free xfers only when it becomes a real bad situation for the full realms, in order to allow more people to pay to transfer to the full realms, not necessarily to help the low-pop realms. They word it very nicely to make it seem like they're doing something benevolent, but they're not. They're simply freeing up room on a bigger server that people want to pay money to transfer to. Plain and simple.

If they get 1,000 people to transfer from the full realms to the tiny realm, that's a potential $25,000 for zero effort they can allow in incoming transfers to the otherwise full realms.

My realm had transfers open for free a few weeks ago. It removed the queue, and things were fine... and then a week later they opened up transfers and we're queued again which shows me that they don't really care about the realm population, they just want to free up available transfer slots for more profit.