How active is the Gal/Cal Faction War, compared to the rest of Eve?

Innocent question on Reddit (if there is such a thing): "Is the Cal/Gal war zone any fun right now?" So I made a quick reply tied to a corpies post, but let's try to back that up a bit first with a bit of narrative and then with a bit of hard data.  Let's compare the Gallente faction to an infamous and large nullsec alliance.

I could talk about a RL coworker of mine who played Eve in that he was subscribed.  But his main was in a WH corp and that wasn't really matching a real-life that had gotten very busy.  He described how logging in at night only to spend the majority of his limited playtime trying to probe out a chain that might maybe find a fight was frustrating.  So I tried to convince him to put an alt in Aideron Robotics, and after a while he spun up an alt and flew him on out.

We got him into a cheap Atron with meta guns while his skill queue started up and undocked.  In the course of the next hour we got three fights: the first that I yolo'd us into and got spanked, then I realized he needed to know more about accel gates and complexes so I took him to a nice quiet little Novice in Fliet and ended up killing an enemy Kestrel, then we flew off and tangled with some local pirates but managed to escape.  I can't say that every night is that packed with fights, but it certainly was a great way to start things off.

So what about the bigger picture, if all nights aren't like that.  Let's take a look at the killboards.  If we look at the Gallente Federation faction we see that zkillboard considers it to have 1398 active PVPers.  Who else in Eve has about that many active PVPers?  Well, Goonswarm Federation actually at 1379.  Yes - the 13000+ null alliance has approximately 1 active PVPer for every 10 members, using zkillboard's definition.  (I bet some of you aren't surprised really).

What do each of those organizations do with effectively the same number of active PVPers?  We see that the Gallente FW have destroyed 955,952 enemy ships while losing 786,103.  By comparison Goonswarm have destroyed 701,783 and lost 517,402.  So Gallente FW is really roughly a quarter more active than Goonswarm.  The Goons have destroyed more by ISK value (90T to 50T).

Now if you look at the zkillboard Alliance list you'll see that Goonswarm is exceptional - PL is roughly half the number of kills and then Brave and BL are half of that.  On the other side you'll see that the Caldari State is pretty close behind the Gallente Federation.

Over the past 90 days Gal + Cal FW has more kills than Goonswarm, Pandemic Legion, Brave Collective, and Black Legion combined.

So yeah, I'd say the Gal/Cal Faction Warfare zone is active - and that it's a lot of fun.