Unfortunately, if we as a community could get the tf2 team to actually listen to some of the suggestions that we can come up with for weapon changes, there would be less of a need for a whitelist. I, like many others, would like to see other things come into play, but some weapons like the pomson and reserve shooter don't make the game a fun one based on mechanical skill and teamwork, and instead create an instance of which team can cheese the other team harder. There are also so many threads of "weapon rebalance suggestion" related topics on this site it's utterly ridiculous. And some of them are so good as well.
For example, I remember pitching an idea to change the consumable items (crit a cola, sandvich, bonk, etc) to be a one-time use, similar to the razorback. Instead of having these recharge over X amount of seconds, just make that item a one-time use thing. Then there would be more of a possible pool for preference, where there isn't a clear cut "best" weapon combo. If you're trading extra bullets to finish off an enemy for a short stat boost where you can try and make a good play sounds much more interesting to me than "here comes the crit a cola'd scout with a pocket medic with a vaccinator, let's hope he doesn't just wipe our team like he did on mid since his drink recharged since the midfight".
It's just incredibly frustrating because some of the people that play the game the most know what problems there are and how to fix it, but without any actual follow through, the game will just continue to progress on the course that it has been for some time now, which is in a general downward direction. We wanted to believe that Matchmaking would be the thing that saved the game and brought more people into it, but the general consensus is that it simply wasn't up to everyone's already low expectations of valve.