Four cities so far away from the center of the map will not be good. You don't want 4 cities at the bottom of the map like that. I will most likely get the Riombara treatment and die out slowly.
There's no one there, though. If they were populated, I'd strongly agree with you. Cutting Riombara off from the world wasn't great for anyone. But as it is, there's no one there, and there will likely never be.
I'm also reluctant because of the Zuma, wouldn't feel right to mess with that area any more than I did without an explicit mention that the Zuma are never ever coming back or that it's otherwise fine to redo the area.
That being said, it's true it's a rather poorly configurated area. It's way too linear. A bunch of cities on top of each other, water to the East, nothing to the West. Unless Nightmarch was colonizable, as that would make a decent capital. On the other hand, it is city/townsland rich, so highly fortifiable, so it would offer an alternative Westgardian PvE experience if realms were to sponsor the effort considerably. Think of it as a backup frontier, should Westgard ever become too successful. It's roaming with rogues, possibly more than anywhere, possibly even daimons, add the distance on top of that, and you've got your ultimate colonization challenge. "Too hard"? Maybe. But that's kind of the point, shouldn't be feasible unless we get a ton more nobles, because the density rules wouldn't allow it anyways. Is it a bit more isolated? Perhaps, but that doesn't bore everyone. And there's a huge difference between "isolated frontier players try to conquer" and "realm that becomes isolated in the middle of nowhere due to realms collapsing around them because of player decay and/or dev intervention". Though the idea is to bring people closer together, it's not to make the whole homogenous.
If we ever run out of land (which I don't see happening unless we dump every player on Dwilight), we could always add a large island/continent between Madina and the Maroccidens.
