hardly find that fair.

As a game developer, you would want new players to come and play your game.

Making things more difficult for new players is not a wise decision.
It is not making it more difficult, if they have the same amount of players as older servers they will progress the same but at the moment the newer servers with less players are getting a bigger slice of the pie as I said the cap is not a bad thing as long as it goes up each lvl.