I hear you. Unfortunately you won't find a mouse that isn't manufactured in China or possibly Taiwan. Even the Mionix products say designed in Sweden, assembled in PRC. But some companies are definitely more deeply involved in the design process than others, which results in higher quality products.
Cougar is definitely in the lower end of that spectrum. They released 7 or so mouse models at once, and basically all they did was pick a shell and a sensor in a catalog, and slap their name on them.
The cougar 300m for example, is the same shell as the CM Storm Alcor and the Dharma Point DRTCM38 (Japanese brand).
If you ever want to sell it I may be interested at half price, as long as the shipping cost doesn't rape me.

remember before the class updates when there was no idling and no trading and no uncrating and no dressing up and the only thing you could do in TF2 was shoot people

What's wrong with it? People always get the 550m, I never hear about that one.

http://www.cougargaming.com/global/img/products/mice/300m/product-section-04.png
Forward/Backward in the cougar driver. Bind those to your side buttons.

It's actually extremely different, did you mean the EC1?

The shell played a big part in the stiffness of the clicks on zowie mice, according to the people who soldered omrons on them. So I don't expect such a huge difference.

I can't really think of anything similar with side buttons.
Maybe evga torq x5?

so ruining a game for 11 people is worse than ruining a game for 23 because competitive tf2 is like such a huge deal

so I guess this thread only exists to advertise this new meme

I mean you could start a fundraiser

Sorry you got tricked into wanting to buy a razer keyboard

A project like saloon.tf doesn't have nearly the same constraints as Netscape or Word or Borland. Most of the points made in that article are aimed at commercial, established, complex applications operating in competitive markets. Saloon.tf is neither of those (at least not on the same scale).
The only risk Geel is facing is the saloon rewrite failing to gain traction in its infancy as features are added and bugs are being fixed. Except the only alternative would be sticking with the old saloon, which he aquired. Only to rewrite it completely, exactly because he was interested in keeping the branding and user base. The old platform, he can pull the plug on whenever he wants.
Meanwhile the benefits of having all his websites built with similar technologies and design are obvious. That article seems to assume that a rewrite can only happen because some guys think the existing codebase is shit. Geel not being familiar with the python stack is a perfectly valid reason.

to get popular servers

I think that looks weird because the flame logo is very complex, there's like 9 parts with different shapes and colors etc, and it's just put there on a plain black surface. Maybe a circle outline around the logo would help it blend in.
The tf2 logo is simpler so it's less of an issue, but I wouldn't put it right next to the flame, maybe on the back.

the guy is on a budget and he's told to spend most of it on a mech keyboard that won't even make any difference in game I don't even

roccat also has the roccat nyth which is twice the price of what any reasonable individual would pay for a mouse but yeah it's out there