Hm, random comments time:
I love playing on retro, and it is the only CS server I play on. Unfortunately starting your MBA program while having a full time job leaves little time for gaming. I always check to see if there are people on, but with my odd hours of play it seems that many times there are not. As much as I would love to join to seed the server, if I only have an hour or so to play, I would like to actually play something. More times then not though I just switch over to TF2 which I play on the ville's servers, as ours didn't make it .
As for the admin thing when ever I have banned anyone (I think like 3 people total ever, who were obvious speed hackers), I always try to make it by the forums afterwords to check in. For maps I try to ask around to the people playing what they feel like so that they stick around, as I agree that playing the same 4 maps over and over will clear out any server.
I think more theme nights like gungame, etc could be fun and draw in a new crowd, especially if they were advertised on the MOTD, etc.
Anyways, those are my two cents, hope they help