It's not so much the status as it is the knowledge.
Put together your server with exactly what you need. This causes less problems overall, including less compatibility clashing, less excessive messages from absolutely everything the player touches (connecting, spawning, etc), less downloading, and overall less you have to worry about sifting through when putting it together.
Make a good thread to showcase it. Trust me. A lot of the good servers have a lot of people popping into them because they posted "Hey, yo, we're open, get in-game". No one's going to sit there refreshing the master server for a server, let alone even bother to check any that just have 1 player if they only have a title to go off of.