Four speed
I don't think anyone can provide you with any numbers since only the developers has the correct figures.
And I don't think anyone believes that CoH would doom and gloom even if PvP was removed from this game, but what I do think some people think is that if CoH pvp (and the PvP feedback from players )werent neglected it would draw in more players to the overall population.
Ofcourse someone could aurgue that makeing 10 new animated tails would be better spent development time and draw more new players than any PvP change would.
But since COH is going f2p there will more then likely get "a lot "of new players trying the game and you would think that they will like coh and try out different aspects of the game includeing PvP.
The only issue with that is that right now, and especially ever since issue 13 COH PvP is very exlusive and very casual player unfriendly just the fact that PvP and PvE work under such different systems is a huge deal.
It would need development time to be able to grow and draw in new players.
I'm not going to shoot down your opinion or your take on the PvP population and general CoH poplulation,but you seem to be not useing very good methodes/sources when it comes to measureing the pvp poplulation in this game.
Especially the whole PvP zone count like I would been surprised you found anyone in a PvP zone yesterday with the 2 year maints O.O
I do believe that everyone would agree its nowhere near what it once was but that does not mean i'ts completely dead.
Also compareing the new incarnate poularity with PvP popularity would be like compareing CoH to WoW,one game with almost unlimited resorurces(?) to a game thats doing good for what it is and has a very loyal fan base.(ya might been a super bad example but still!)
It's been what? 2-3 years since CoH PvP got any significant dev time and that was huge fiasco O.o
Also you wanted someone to provied some numbers of somekind and I found this:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=260915
I'm not drawing any conclusions but it might help some in discussing the subject about the CoH population.
Personally I hope CoH Freedom is a huge sucess and boost Coh's population and sales since it has been slowly declineing for some time now,which probably would be the a normal thing for a 7 year old game.