My feeling is that if people know they are isolated they will be more willing to field expensive ships. So, people rolling connections for fights will have a better chance of fiding someone on siege mode than if they always end krabbing when their static has 15 hours.
For that to happen the WH should be in the invisible state, so someone warped to the other side before, right?
This may have been fixed, when i did this a couple months ago I filed a bug report, and it was closed back in May, although with a rather vague conclusion.