If you're talking about demos being broken by the vaccinator update over christmas, who knows? Last time Valve did fix it I believe but I don't think they've said if they're going to fix it this time. Hopefully it will be.

I believe it should be possible to get tf2 from the Orange Box and then manually apply updates until you get a version that plays demos. I'm am currently engaged in this horrible process, will report back.

we could all send angry emails and the spam the shit out of the devs.

Who knows, we could've just lost like 4 years of demos forever. valve really needs to do something about competitive tf2.