It's just that the game is a huge timesink, but no one agrees on what should be done to minimize the timesink or what direction the game should go. Since it's going to be a vague demand the imms will not accept chop job solutions, and the game will not shift culture fast enough to adapt to something well thought out, it's been tried and suggested before.
But I can guarantee that not only will this not instantly bring us back to 80-90, which isn't 120 but is still more or less double what we have now, but is probably not the root of the issue at hand all by itself.
You need to make a drive to get older players to come back and convince them the game has changed for the better. That's first off, and it's a very tall fucking order since the majority of those players are all in their 30's-40's. Retaining players who already are aware of what it takes to learn the game and won't mind getting their asses kicked as much is paramount to help the new blood because those vets will know what questions to ask. Or so the assumption goes.
Your next problem is relying only on the voting sites because no one knows what the fuck to do. This is ridiculous inactivity when I've seen plenty of other mu*'s allow for advertising of other mu*'s within reason. All you do is seek out the places that allow for other advertisements cross-genre, find the places that have the general player personality types that may or may not convert to CF's archetype, and then make an effort to avoid or re-evaluate adult-RP accepted mu*'s, which is probably a given but worth mentioning since they now make up a decent percentage of what's out there.
Once you've tried both of those things, then you can change the basics of how the game is played. But CF does not and should not have a Prima Strategy Guide. It just needs to get fucking smaller, and the imms probably need to continue the trend of bumping up XP gain. Solo players need more ways to gain xp than a flat percentage boost, and pairs of characters should become as profitable as groups of 3. 3 should remain static and 4 should go downhill.