Once being apart of this community as an Advisor/DL, I can tell you that this division throughout the years (even before I was apart of this community) , has always flip flopped between servers due to not having the Playerbase for those servers. The only difference comparing now to the past (talking about during the period when valve removed the ability to queue into community servers rather than finding them through server list), is that community servers now rely more than ever for it's members to populate and fill the servers initially and build up it's population.
Payload servers are incredibly popular as the two main servers I play (Oprah's PL server and NH/End of the line) are usually always filled during the evening and sometimes even in the afternoon. As the summer approaches, I'd really recommend taking advantage of this time of period and being analytical about the servers as we move deeper into the period of time were a majority of people are more free/available during these coming months. I don't follow this community as much due to growing up but starting some sort of grassroots campaign and just finding a period of time where a majority of it's members can play and working on a server or two would be quite beneficial as when back in the glory days of the division, we managed to boost some of the servers ranks/populations when we had 7-8 servers
TF2 in it's current state for communities/clans cannot support having that many servers anymore. 3-4 is a perfect number unless you're SKIAL or something. If there's future interest in a payload server, I'd HIGHLY recommend checking Oprah's server or the new No-Heroes server (End of the line) and getting a general idea of the current state of PL servers. They usually are quite modded (to the point of having their own development teams) and are very customized. Running classic style maps can be quite challenging for growth unless it's a popular map such as the ones you guys currently have offered (Hightower/Harvest).
As someone who's been there and done that, and continues to play this game often after all these years, I do state and warn you that if you do attempt to try to run a Payload server, you have to try to be apart of the giants which means making the server a priority server as these servers draw in HUGE attendance if you have a consistent and dedicated group to work on it. A ton of the old player base who use to be eGO servers are on these PL servers. I see Dragonhill (if you know who the old fart is) still playing on my main PL server.
This division has gone through almost every time of map and game mode. It's time to just prioritize on what works and what doesn't.
Before COVID hit, the communities server I play on (No-Heroes/Top-Notch) managed to have an IRL meet up in Chicago and was an amazing experience with us all going to a LAN center (was about 43~ of us) because of the payload server community.
I wish you all best of luck in your future endeavors but just wanted to drop my two cents as this was a discussion we had multiple times over the years.
I'll go now lurking for a couple of months.
tl;dr, if you guys want any more community servers, focus on the ones you currently have or funnel all your energy into a PL server. There will be no in-between. Summer months are a great opportunity as TF2's population can hit its highest growth period and activity base outside of the holidays.