I'm pretty impressed with the amount of attention and agreement this thread received!
I think that a small group of staff with creative mode could sweep bastion pretty quickly, removing eye-sores and things of that sort. Another thought that came to mind is that some worlds are supposed to be exclusively for PVP and resource gathering, right? Why not develop/install some sort of plugin to reset those worlds? I played on the server for the first time recently and it seemed that everyone was really concerned with finding gold and other ores. The first town I joined has a leader that said "Most people say the Bastion has no gold left." With such a massive server population, the resources aren't going to last forever. Resetting the worlds every week or so would allow new players to make a name for themselves on the server.
On a similar note, I was kind of confused as to why it costs 500 coins to lock a chest. I mean, as a new player, 500 coins is A LOT. Even as an experienced player, it's still a lot. Obviously I'm a new player and I probably don't understand the server's economy like the rest of you; but shouldn't it revolve around more than finding gold to lock your chests? Not only does it make the game more difficult than it should be, but it creates more "eye-sores" as well. As I've noticed in my short amount of time playing on the server, most people lock their chests anyway, just by putting a piece of dirt on top of the chests. Now you have dirt everywhere, in front of doors, on top of chests, etc. Why not just allow free LWC? It's near impossible to create functioning storage rooms since you can't securely place chests on top of each other.
Back to the economy though, I think it should about more than locking chests and such. You'll have to forgive me for this, I'm not trying to advertise (I hate the server's crooked staff with a passion), but Athery's Acended/Gazamo has a beautiful economic system. It works flawlessly, and I believe it's based on iConomy. There are no chest shops, there are just central markets in each of the six main cities. Once you've travelled to the market, you can always sell your items with a simple "/sell dirt 100" command. Prices fluctuate automatically based on simple supply and demand. If there are no items available to buy in the market, you can't buy them. This creates a more in-depth economy, rather than just being able to buy, for example, infinite diamonds from an admin shop at $80 a piece, like some servers do.
Another thing I saw someone say is that the trade plugin is basically unused because of bugs with it and that it's really kind of unneeded. I think it's a great idea, looks really cool (reminds me of the old days of Runescape), but I just think it doesn't work like it was intended to in Minecraft.
Excuse me guys for complaining so much about a server and community that I probably have no business complaining about, but these are my thoughts and I'm sure they're shared by quite a few other people as well.