New engineers coming, that's sounds great.
I'm happy to describe 50 players online. First I play on SDGamers and their servers are set on 64, although usually 24 - 32 or so play concurrently. And it's vanilla with only an automated server reboot every 6 hours. Why the reboot is mainly the Client to server Desyncing gets bad, and guessing memory leaking (almost like the old ARMA 2 Dayz MOD days kinda desyncs). The servers are Co-OP and players usually set up vending spots and trade openly as well helping out new players. The Admins jump on and play and often build a free-for-all Horde night base out of DEV blocks I assume.
If you guys were able to just get 7 days to die running 24 player stable, it would be a huge boon. You be surprised how many players love playing together.