The game is 16 years old. But it also

• is consistently in the top 5-10 games played on steam by concurrent players (and in fact just broke its own playercount record with this update)
• is consistently in the top echelons of gross revenue each year
• has new microtransactions added every ~3-6 months

I’ve been over this a lot, over the past few years, but in my opinion it just being old isn’t an excuse for Valve to neglect it so, where an update that was announced in advance as something more than usual just ended up being 100% community-made content and about 2 seasonal updates stapled together. What I really want is one last weapon balance pass, some tweaks to default graphics settings to make it run a bit better for new players (something like mastercomfig already implements these settings for you if desired), an emptying of the shop of some of the most egregious instances of overcharging for items that cost vastly less on the community trade circuit - quality of life stuff.