Ah, I just had a wonderful match now and wanted to find a relevant thread to post about it!

Your third point... truer words have never been spoken. I just had a Dustbowl match on casual mode. What was special about this Dustbowl match, is that there was nothing special about it. No hacker, no rager, no memer, and everyone was a beginner with badges 1-10, with vanilla loadouts and a few sidegrades here and there. I was the best armed and dressed in the server, with the standard Crossbow, Quick-Fix and Amputator along with a Genuine Foppish Physician and a Gibus. Nobody had a stock reskin, or an Aussie, or a Botkiller, or an unusual, or a taunt. As a matter of fact I was the only one with a taunt, and that would be the Director's Vision.

The match was an absolute blast. Everything was so nostalgia-inducing. Battles played out so differently from what we're used to nowadays. Just as the bots fight, we would collect around an area and have massive firefights at alleys, corners and corridors, holding the line and spraying at any who dared trespass, with Medics and dispensers on both sides sustaining the battle, a big tug-of-war game for the next piece of land in an attempt to reach the point. It was like I was playing a match lost in the mists of time, as tf2 was when it was just released for free at 2011. When I first picked it up. And my first ever match was Dustbowl... :')