Its been stated a few times already but let me reiterate. A lot of the people in this thread have been using the terms alliance and merge interchangeably, probably because they didn't initially come here to argue over specifics, AND don't see a meaningful difference in the two. The difference between a merge and an alliance (like the amount of characters available etc) would only impact a small margin of players. An increased population would impact significantly more people, so I am not surprised we are getting people posting who 1)Want a bigger population and 2) don't really care whether its a merge or an alliance. And I don't expect some of them to read through all these pages to figure out there has been a discussion to distinguish the two concepts, because ultimately this is just a thread for people to state their opinions, and move on.
Lets face it, whether its a merge or an alliance is a backburner issue to the pressing issue of the dead population.
I'm also almost guaranteed it would be an alliance over a merge. They've done plenty of alliances already and never any merges to gms. the don't have to do deal with the headache of characters in certain worlds, etc. Lets all just hope they fix this issue sooner rather than later.