I'll just hope to answer everything in one go.
GE - We had a public test in world 3 for a long while, players reported some of the bugs and they were fixed. Thomy decided to release it and within about 10 minutes someone already explained how to dupe on the shoutbox. The server was then rolled back to before the update and the GE was disabled, as was w3. Thomy has plans on releasing it later, there are no details on when.
Playercount - We have about 150-170 on during weekdays and 200-250 during weekends. That's not really an accurate representation of our total users as we have a lot of users that aren't all that active. As for why we don't have as many players as during emps-scape, there are a few reasons.
The shutdown, jagex shut down emps-scape at some point. Jagex changed their policy on private servers a long while later so it was allowed to bring it back up again. A lot of old users weren't informed it was back up and some moved on to other servers or games. Rsps dying in general, the playercount of all servers has been lowering for a long while. People that grew up with runescape are growing older and are losing interest in the game. There is also OSRS which has taken a lot of players from private servers, especially with updates like f2p and bonds.
We won't suddenly get back to 1k playercount with an update or two, it's a really slow progress. We have been gaining players as of late, or at least have more active players. Just be patient with the server and maybe try to help gain players.