I don't want things to "stay the same" arbitrarily. All I want is for the game to remain small enough that running games is doable and it retains the small town feeling where people know each other. That's all. If it gets so big that those things aren't possible then it won't be the game that we apped into anymore.

All that's needed for the queue to still be an issue is for the rate of apps to exceed the rate of drops. Whatever maths you throw at it, if people are apping faster than they're dropping then the queue will grow. When's the last time you saw a game that wasn't dying that had the same amount of apps as drops? That's why the queue isn't going to go away.