While going through this deflation, we need to be careful about making a massive change like eliminating one or more regions before we see what the future holds. As someone who has played this game for 5 years, we go through periods of decline, but it is not permanent.
Proponents of regional consolidation have made the game's cycles of activity a lynchpin of their argument. The goal of establishing a three-region system is to create robust regions that remain interesting and competitive throughout even the lowest ebbs of these cycles. The five-region status quo fails to provide this to more than a fraction of Atlasians even during the best of times.
I realize that some people still question whether the dissolution of the RPP and the JCP in February 2012 was a good idea, but the last major change to the game lead to a year of swelling census rolls and increasing activity. With another election year only months away, we need to make the game as attractive as possible to prospective new players. Stagnant regions compromise our ability to do that. We can greet people with competitive elections, or we can greet them with elections that aren't contested or voting booths that fail to open. If you were a newly-registered Atlasian, which would make you more likely to participate?
That's certainly something to take into consideration for sure. If I knew that reducing regions to a lesser number would automatically create competitive elections, then I would be likely to support it. But if that's the argument behind the reduction, we would need to reduce it to 3 rather than 4 to make the largest pool of voters/candidates possible.