the thing you say about tf2 needing so many hotfixes, i'm pretty sure many other games would've needed a lot more considering tf2 is 8 (or 9) year old game. that's a really long time isn't it? when you think about how badly each new assassin's creed game launches or how broken just cause 3 was on launch, i'd pretty confidently say the tf2 team is doing a pretty good job.
Please don't compare games at launch to one of the most popular shooters of all time which still continues to make a fair amount of money.
programming is also incredibly misunderstood. it's not a jigsaw puzzle you rearrange or add to and it all magically works. a game the size of tf2 is going to have an insanely massive pile of code and going through it is extremely difficult.
I don't need to understand programming to understand that it's very unusual for a game that makes so much money to have an increasing amount of issues whilst drastically decreasing performance over the years without any considerable visual or gameplay improvement.
The best part about it is the initial maps are still the same, the game still plays the same. Aside from skins, I could go play the game back in 2009 and it would still be the same exact game. Why would I get significantly worse performance and stability in a public game of pl_badwater now than I would 7 years ago? What warrants this?
It's as if when they first introduced multicore support to TF2 they just said fuck it.
please stop passing judgement about something you don't understand and stop talking about the tf2 team as if they're just sitting around raking in cash while jerking off at the office.
I'm sure they're hard at work, just have been severely lacking on proper prioritization until now. Though for the most part they have been raking in the cash; most updates nowadays just introduce maps and items developed by the community.