Personally, I feel that dedicated servers are necessary for a proper community, people tend to make more friends of the "regulars". However, every dedicated server crashes sooner or later, and it's often half a day before the host finds out and puts it back up. There's your time to shine.
The thing people like about dedicated servers is, they can come and go as their schedule suits them, so a host who lives in Australia, for example, can still make a good server available for players in America and Europe.
Every dedicated server I have seen has needed some work. There is one server that I have seen that was capable of true epicness, and that server belonged to Tomtom (aka Gambsy). Glass's server is half-assed and I usually play it because there's nothing better to do. the other TDMs don't have enough players due to the fact that players don't join TDMs that don't have enough players. So the problem is ironically self-causing.
What it takes is getting enough people on initially. After you get the first few semi-regulars, the server will be more populated and others will start heading over. Unfortunately, unless you yourself can procure some method of 24/7-ness, your regulars won't be too regular due to fluctuating schedules.
Me, I got the ideas. I've got about ten server ideas that have never been done before. The problem is, each one is missing one crucial mod feature that it would require to function properly, and nobody will make the damn things for me, so I sit in obscurity on single-player servers doing my own little thing. It sucks, I know how you feel. The most people that have ever been on my server at once was four, and that was cause I was hosting for someone else who had bad internet. But I'm working... working and waiting.
(insert "...Soon." meme picture here)
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