It is not just for newbies that the game can feel empty - It is for anyone who doesn't have a very up-to-date Remember list, and for people who don't have many active friends playing.
Because there are limits to ones remember list, worse for some than others, you always have to juggle who to remember, and I have many times gone over my remember list and checked who hadn't logged in for years, and then deleted those from my Remember-list to make room for new names.
Now, the current who list have actually made it possible for me to see old players log in, that I once knew but didn't have in my remember anymore. That is very nice, and if the who list was anon again, several old players that knew each other could be logged in, without actually knowing it.
Also I don't play very actively, but when I log in and check my who list, it's full of Myths from enemy guilds. It is actually nice to see a list names of the other players out there, apart from the same 3-5 enemy names from my who list. That makes the game seem more alive to me, even though I'm not a newbie. Well, maybe titans are considered newbies these days

I guess in general, I like the game being a lot more open in many aspects, than it was when I started out in the mid 90'ies. The who list being one of those.