It's fatigue, Arthiel.
Many folks would love to have a setting enforced as strictly as you're envisioning, but that requires a majority to want that, and to be able to enforce that. Neither of these conditions are true.
The path of least resistance is to do whatever you feel like regardless of if it's damaging to the setting. Therefore people standing outside that path are going to be discounted and shunned and treated as old men yelling at clouds. And being that pariah is tiring and isolating.
The environment will reflect what the average player wants without external influence (ie, DMs and staff actively punishing setting-breaching behaviour). And in the outskirts especially, the number of people who want to see the kind of environment the server advertises is simply outnumbered by the people who are ambivalent about it, and want to either do their own thing, or outright mock it, or consider themselves an exception.
The outskirts isn't going to become a high-RP area without DMs being willing to tell people how to RP - which I believe they don't want to do, understandably, as it's a task fraught with long, tiring conversations for them, and handling endless complaints.
The Outskirts exists as a place you constantly work to not be in. Find events that aren't there, and attend. Join factions that do stuff elsewhere. Create reasons for groups of likeminded people to leave that area. It's where your immersion, and the enchantment of the server goes to die.
Once you leave the sightline of the crowds of high level casters (who really should know better), the night actually becomes pretty scary again.