The hammer is terrible for the game IMO. At best, it is just a lag generator if all 3 factions are equally populated. At worse; it always winds up in the hands of the biggest faction eventually and increases the imbalance.
I think their hope with it was they could code it to show up at an underpowered alliance spawn point. But they couldn't figure out how to code that so it's just random instead.
Even if it did show up at another faction in that situation, it's just as likely to be taken from them by the dominant faction. I've seen occasions when a low-pop faction will just let it sit there until it despawns, or a couple of players will just hold it behind the gates until it goes away.