Playing on a vanilla map would be better than nothing. But like TW said, it would be like the last vanilla map we had.. after a while you just go on, have nothing to do, log out.
I'm sure it's possible to get this working, other servers do. We must just have too many mods, or one thats dodgy, or just people are using the machines/timers/redstone/etc selfishly (with or without realising).