1. i don't think any new weapons will be added anytime soon, nor changes to existing weapons. there might be relooks at weapons, but i doubt that stances will change.
2. no

ok thanx

pls unban base jumper

the reason for weapons being banned is that they are either, overpowered, break the game or are annoying to play against.
The base jumper is banned because it makes you really hard to kill and makes medic even more of a pain to play.
In this case the weapon is boring to play against and overpowered.

tell me you're bad at tf2 without saying you're bad

i dont see why base jumper should be banned cuz of how shit it is. its whatever tho i dont care enough to get a weapon with no potential unbanned.

I think it was originally banned when you could spam it which was rly broken but its really shit now since u can only use it once

true, except it wasnt banned at that time because it was broken it was because everyone thought it was unfun. they also reduced how much u can strafe with it by 50%, another big but deserved nerf. even when i used it in its prime i determined it was shit, now its just even shittier. it did have some very unattractive qualities tho before 2017, so the ban was justified.

except it was. The sheer pressure you can put out by skyboxing yourself and being extremely difficult to hit and generally requiring multiple players of investment to handle for a significant period of time basically wins a push.

It's not just about medics getting assfucked because they get to be forced off of good positioning, it's the resources taken to stop the soldier from keeping that pressure going for long enough to enable a push.

i realize that and tried to envision moments where base jumpers good for that on mainly process after my first post, i thought of stuffing iT but ruled that 1 out because theyre gonna be using regardless, i thought about mid and the high bombs, the standard ones & the rampslide bomb, thought about fast rollouts, thought about when a team wants to push thru 1 and a soldier ctaps with base jumper to delay it, thought of what itd be like on the shitty maps, like propaganda and villa.
only the high bombs seemed interesting but mediocre. the ctaps whatever. at first i thought it was pretty decent, but the more i think about it the more i dislike it. and itd most likely be pretty overpowered on propaganda mid if the other team doesnt run a sniper, which would never be a consideration unless a soldiers running base jumper. thats not something to worry about now though, i think its established that map is terrible and wont come back. thought about just ctapping while holding metal 2nd and a team wants to push alley, nothing too special. metalworks mid high bombs, actually seems like itd be good but its not like theres no response to that. would be pretty interesting if u got 2 base jumper soldiers to run liberty launcher and make it impossible to push anything cuz of the spam, but idunno how well thatd play out, probably poorly outside of the handful of situations its good.

tldr; even when u cherry pick the times the weapons good, ur giving up the mobility and hp u save from gunboats for plays that could pretty much have been done with gunboats to begin with. the biggest attraction for that wep is the spam. if U wanna talk about an actual overpowered weapon lets talk about the mantreads, that conversations about 1 or 2 years too premature though, and id rather let the meta take its course than ban it before everyone realizes how broken it is

mantreads are honestly sick, and people are going to learn that the hard way someday.

As far as weapons being situationally too powerful, vaccinator was banned even though it's strictly inferior to normal uber outside of last. There are incredibly degenerate borderline map-ruining strats available with the base jumper as you noted even in its current form, and that's just with some light theorycrafting. Obviously the downsides are substantial, as you have to argue against just running gunboats or shotgun, but in 6s you can stalemate anywhere, and that's enough time to bring out a weapon. I'm sure people would come up with much much better given time with the weapon. It's basically just not fit for play in 6s.

Mantreads for bombs but better have definitely not seen enough use though. 6s isn't quite as "free" as HL is in regards to just being able to whip mantreads bomb into fucking anything and be borderline unstoppable, but some dogshit stalemates like metalworks or sunshine lasts could definitely see some quite hefty benefits as just the most obvious of the most obvious uses.