I'm gonna ramble. A lot. Feel free to call out on the silliest crap. I'm really tired.

------ Eco ideas

Keep the jobs and the same basic style of donor shop that we have. Remove the gold trade, and add in a trade for a few different items, some basic and some not, that actually fluctuates based on supply and demand. Like how gold used to be, or the automatic meepshop. There should be no more than a dozen items in that shop. Vshop should have a cap of how many of X item can be put up at one time (example: only 1000 diamonds can be up at a time total. Only 10K stone. Only 5K logs. whatever.)
OR don't even add the /shop at all. The eco when we had chest shops only was the strongest it had been in awhile. it inspired lots of creativity and working ot keep your shops up and a visual and obvious location for any player to sell their items. It's less confusing to a new player tbh.

Add in more quests. make a team. Varying levels of difficulty, optional side bits, rewards, easter eggs.

Bring back events in full force. Make it exciting. give out special prizes sometimes, such as a custom head, an Eff 6 pick, extra god armour, a sharp V bush lol. but you get it, make people really want to play.

Make a nice tutorial. a NICE one, with current and accurate info. Start players off with $500, they get $2500 when they finish the tutorial. Clearly state that fact at the first spawnpoint.

-------- Staff
Remove helper as we know it and bring back the kind of trial mod style. People will be "helper" for 2 weeks to prove themselves. If they prove capable and/or useful, they get to be mod. Everything that a moderator does can very easily be handled by a helper - it's honestly not that much responsibility. If I can do it alone as a helper/mod for 4-5 months, an entire team should be capable of figuring it out. It all starts with training them how to do the mod stuff, which no one does.

-------- plugins and worlds

Seriously, add factions.
Seriously.
Make sure jobs and shop and /shop won't break in a week because people are terrible at setting their own prices. set limits at first and you can remove them later. Maybe you do have to hold the people's hand for a little while.
Don't promise things you can't keep and don't promise a due date, you're terrible at that, the whole lot LOL
Never add a second towny world again.
reset wild more.
sometimes we can give players sillier things that arent so much for "the goodof the server" because if they don't harm anything theres no reason why not. put more effort in
edit: 1.8 PVP. FOR SURE. DONT MAKE THAT MISTAKE AGAIN

----------- Other stuff
[strike]Allow up to 3 words of caps like the good old days.[/strike]
Remove caps filter. Enforce the 3 words of caps rule. Remove all chat filters in /msg.
Promote the other types of gameplay more, because kit and skyblock are basically dead, the minigames are boring because there are no solid amount of people that play, make things EXCITING
Stop warning so goddamned much - a /kick IS a warning.
Be more loose in general, honestly the community is tearing each other apart half the time with the tenseness.