I play alliance on Skullcrusher.
(look me up, Human paladan named Eorl)
I often find a que when I try and join in Prime time. Last night it was 127 but I was on in under 4 minutes.
Durring an outage, we (My Guild) Rolled some Horde on Gorfiend (Low populatiuon East Coast)
(look me up Snaga, Scatha, Narash)
We never see an issue with Gorfiend
I guess WoW is a victim of too much sucess too fast and bad load balancing
(FFXII Got around this by requiring you to go to what server they told you to use and earn a "world pass" to invite your friends onto your server)
I think that the best option would be to offer the opportunity to move your Chars to Low pop servers and keep your level/loot Offer it for 1 week only and to SPECIFIC Low pop servers only.
Then again, The disruption in game economy/databasemanagement and interface design for such a process would probabaly take as much work as fixing the servers as they are... so I could be wrong. I wouldnt know unless I got a chance to see the environment