VCMP has no promotion.
Where do you even download VCMP 0.4 as a new player? From moddb? From maxorator's topic in the VCMP forum? How are you going to find it?
Once you have the browser, it redirects to a dead forum link -
http://vicecitymultiplayer.com/forum/VCMP's barrier of entry is too high.
The only newbie friendly servers is littlewhiteys, because it does everything to prevent the player from using glitches.
You see the most populated server (in the past) - RTV - you join it, you get killed by a guy crouching with molotovs or sliding on your screen. How? How on Earth do you do that?
Oh wait. You can't join it, because the system requires manual account approval due to the plague of cheaters in VCMP. Just like EAD has today. Because of cheaters.
VCMP has no maintenance.
The forum has gone down in the past, the masterlist has gone down in the past bringing playercount to staggering lows.
Glitches are abused and made part of daily in-game combat.
The last update was probably a year ago, if not more. There is no contact with the developers. The only active developer is AdTec_224 who, mind you, is not even originally a VCMP dev, but a LU dev. I thank the developers for all the work they have done.
Player market
Charley, as much as I agree with your idea, this is pretty hard to ignore. Where are you going to get these players from? All over the globe? Asia? We have this term 'cafer' for players who use gaming cafes in Pakistan to play. Even that's not enough.
In my honest opinion, even SAMP has playercount problems. Go in and you will see thousands of Russian roleplay servers that are most likely 90% of the total "players" active.
Separation
Finally, you have servers that promote separatism. You have Chinese-only servers that you can't play at because of lag, being unable to download files or just not understanding anything. I've seen some Hungarian-only servers. I've seen a Turkish-only server, but that one was filled with bots. You have groups that promote belonging to a certain nationality, all of those mentioned condone sitting in your own echo chamber without interacting with "different" people.
Conclusion
I believe that in the past, me and morphine discussed a similar idea. I think that there was a point in time when this genuinely would have helped, but I'm not sure if we're not past the point of "no return" already. Nonetheless since you've named me, I'm willing to help because at least then, I can say that I've tried.
If you searched 'Vice City Multiplayer' on Google, and found that forum, would you be interested to explore the mod and its community? Fuck no.
Agree.