I see a lot of interesting vague concepts in the this thread, and I'd like to ask for something more concrete, if you will. Perhaps we could have some suggestions as to what people would actually like to physically see?
I've seen, over my time with Minecraft a vast array of scenarios regarding different forms of spawn. On one end of the spectrum I've seen no spawn, and people either spawn in a random place (ala Survival servers), to a system where new players choose a city to spawn in (my previous server). On the other end of the spectrum, I've seen one-spawn systems similar to our server here where it was either something minor and small (think crossroads), all the way up to a large server spawn city (think Port Silver).
We've swung already from the Large City model to a small minor location model in the past, and people seem to desire and swing back in the other direction. So I'd like to ask, what would people like to see? Keep in mind that we've done this song and dance before and public opinion could easily shift back to the 'spread around lesser spawn'.