Beside long term players that stay, maybe not online daily, but they are here for years or even decades. But most of your proclamated changes would make life a lot more difficult for them, maybe even force most of them to leave. Once you saw all your efforts going down the drain for some new features it is not very likely you come back. AS has experienced this before, back in times when there were only a few servers and everything was a Beta.
If you want daily competition maybe the servers that reset are better for you. Longterm servers are, as the name already implements, made for players focussing on longterm goals. May it be in marketshare, fleet size, alliance goals or just spending time with AS enthusiasts. There are players being online daily on very old servers and there are also some that only show up once a month but used to be much more active. Some even return after a break and decide to be much more active again. Maybe even you someday loose some interest in AS and are happy to return after a 3 months break without the need to start with 10 mio AS$ again but just continue where you stopped before. This game platform is not WOW where you might play for hours a day, this is more considered as a long term strategy game where it does not matter if your private life needs a focus for several weeks and where having children does not ruin you invested gameplay of the past years. That may be kind of frustrating for new players that would like to play 8 hours a day and that can not await to fleet in the next plane expecting some kind of reward for their activity, but it is also an important comfort feature for longterm players that AS has promoted right from the start. Changing this, though your ideas also have benefits, would request a major change from the clients of AS as well as a complete change in gaming philosophy of AS.
I personally believe, that updating the older servers with the new features would not gain a single additional player. At the beginning of the year we have seen numerous features that should be implemented this year like a historic server, aircraft conversions, aircraft upgrades, booking classes… Ok, the year is not over now, but by now nothing has changed. And I guess, even with the new features the number of AS players would not have increased. Maybe some AS players would start on an additional server if the configurations are interesting… but in general AS is a niche game and it will never be able to run 20 servers with 1000 players each. The demand for this kind of games is simply not there. So for me it is logic, that older servers have less players. With the growing size of the fleet and a pressure raise in the competition some win and some loose. A game in which everybody wins is no challenge. At the end the demand of the server is transported by 70,80,90… players with larger fleets and maybe numerous airlines. That is always the same and will not change in future. If there are 2 active airlines in a country like Thailand operating 2000 aircraft the is no space for an additional player, no matter what the configuration of it may be.