I happen to like uncrowded low-density well-social-netted resource-rich locales. It's probably a Canadian thing.
Fun fact: Iceland's
second largest city has a mere 18,000 pop and they have not yet succumbed to the ills of inbreeding even after several centuries of continuous settlement with generally far fewer people than that.
In any case, it keeps me from having to play surge-catchup to feed/energize an ever-increasing pop (at 2% per cycle natural growth, every 50,000 citizens means an extra ~6000 every day, and that adds up fairly rapidly with the Pop * Resource requirements at increasingly higher levels).
And from an sfnal point of view, Darkover had a mere 200 or so original colonists (plus
chieri and whatever other lurking interbreeding non-humans there were) and managed to end up with reality-warping psychic redheads, so maybe the shallow gene pool won't be all that bad if it leads to some potentially useful mutations and gene drift should the other Planet Baen freeholds start to invade once they've got the entire alliance thing sorted out.