Kinda glad I waited to post cause a lot of what I wanted to talk about already got posted.
The population of the "invite meeting" was heavily skewed because there a number of people there to specifically talk about unlocks having tested them. That likely already skews the opinion of people in that group because people who want to unban weapons are more likely to test them. After that there were at most one or two players from each team. BUT
Keep in mind the invite meeting in purely to help tri make decisions, none of those players actually have any direct power except for tri.
also I, once again, didn't know about the invite meeting until literally as it was happening (on the sunday before christmas)
It was my understanding that things were unbanned with the intention that people would abuse them over the next two weeks so they could be banned if they were broken. The fact that the whitelist pugs were held up as true proof of the weapons potential is laughable but two weeks is still not enough time to test weapons. It took people more than two weeks for stuff like the loose cannon or quick fix. Only once in my life I've actually gotten 6 people on the same page about how the direct hit functions to the point where the weapon was viable.
bonk is inherently unfun similar to cow mangler / dhit. No matter how little these items affect the game the fact that they negatively affect the game and that not a lot of people really want to play with them ( the people that do are the people that abuse them ) probably means they should be banned.
while I haven't personally tested it, it sounded like steak sandvich can open up heavy to mid on some maps for lower level teams which will be absolutely cancer for those players while having "no effect on top level play"
solemn vow is the only weapon that was genuinely interesting of the ones suggested but the people who suggested unbanning it acted like it didn't do anything even though this weapon can let you do awesome stuff should you learn how to use it properly. ultimately, it's going to give medic more control over the game, which i'm not opposed to at all. At its worst it's going to force people to be more aware of when they're building badly during a fight.
I still don't understand the "let's unban things because unbanning things = good" mentality. When I've asked why a few people have been unable to provide real reasoning beyond "unbanning things is good." A few people have mentioned that valve will be more willing to help the comp scene which I don't believe at all. There is no evidence to support this in my mind. At this point, valve doesn't really even support the pub scene. They release some new hats every month and sometimes release a map or something to keep people happy and like once a year they make new contracts for people.
Other people have said that unbanning more weapons will open the game up to more pubbers which is also probably not true. People don't play the game because of 1 weapon that they specifically want to use and if they did, they're probably the weapons that break the game beyond belief that we'll never unban.
I'm not really a fan of this process or most of these weapons (or what they do to the game)
It really feels like there is a staunch, stubborn few individuals that are forcing these changes upon us for reasons that a lot of people see invalid and a lot of the reasoning they're using is logically flawed and they don't seem to acknowledge that even when it's pointed out.
If you want the items to stay unbanned my advice is to abuse the shit out of them over the next two weeks and then complain a metric fuckton in a way tri can see (tftv works)