As the author of the wonkmen I wish you luck, but I have to concede and say no open beastman CA will last unless it's something actively impactful and a driving force in the world of lotc.
Consider it like this. A new player joins the server, and see what race they want to play. They see the options available to them, without the need of an application or further reading on the forums. That player may eventually branch outwards, and try these CA races, but the number of people who do is significantly fewer than the people who don't, because of the extra effort required. And the people who actually stick with a creature after the freshness and newness of them dies down is always very low.
This is why I spent a long time as ST fighting some managers a few years back, who wanted to make halflings an open CA. It would have destroyed the halfling niche, because it would have been instantly less accessible to new players. This would have resulted in a slow death for halfling roleplayers, because appeal and accessibility to new players is a valuable resource.
Now, halflings get to be a fully open race because, one, they are iconic and from lotr, and two, they're basically small humans, meaning anyone can roleplay them without much reading or effort. The mousemen are different in the way wonks are different; in making them unique and cool to play, you have to make them essentially inaccessible to new players. Any half decent new animal people have to be unique enough to be fun, but by doing that it ostracizes itself by requiring that application
This is ultimately why wonks failed, and why kha were on the chopping block for so long. We can only have a few of these low activity races, because having too many would kill the little activity that they shared. If we had 10 of these races, each might have one active player. This is a roleplay server intended for interaction, and having one player per race is extremely bad for roleplay and for player retention.
This is why the ST has to be the big bad wolf and go "grr, activity!!" It's not because they hate fun things, or cute mouse people, it's because it's their job to think about the impact of a piece of lore being implemented. Every time one of these pieces is voted on, it's a conundrum for them, because the ST like everyone else WANTS this cute **** to be playable. But we can't greenlight all of them, and there can only ever be a few available spots for open CAS such as this.
I hope I explained things decently. This isn't a critique of your lore, but I'm just trying to explain what these ST mean about "flavor of the month" and the inherent problems of how open CAs work that almost always result in inactivity. I really do wish you luck with this piece of lore, because we do need niches like this.
I love the cute mouse people and keep up the good work.