Lots of interesting and good points raised in this thread; it's a good sign of a growing scene, essentially. I'm more or less going to summarize what everyone has been saying, maybe to make our work on this more concise.
- Reaching out to pub communities, seeing how we can cross promote.
- Stuff like Tip of the Hats
- Teams staying alive, maybe even streaming more so they start to have fanbases themselves
- More people to make more consistent content for TF.TV
- enigma to be working on the site, 24/7 (jk, but he's definitely looked into making this page more accessible to newer people).
Does that sound pretty decent?
Now, my own OPINIONS on the future of competitive TF2:
I wouldn't be sitting here doing work on it and playing in it if I didn't think it would be dying. It's not going away any time soon. It's still slowly growing thanks to various efforts on part of everyone who positively pushes this scene a little bit further. Other MAJOR competitive scenes have even glanced at TF2 to see how it's doing (IPL is my go to example, there have been others too). And they'll keep looking as it keeps growing. At some point, someone is going to give it a try on the next level. That's when it really will matter what we do. Torbull and folks at ESEA are doing a decent job of keeping the level of competitiveness high, at least, and as we saw recently with Torbull being on Live on Three (djWHEAT's show), even TF2 is starting to get a couple big name eyes from outside of the scene).
In short, there is an incredible amount of potential, and we'll get there if people keep playing, keep innovating on our production and content, and the like. Valve's lack of participation is annoying, to be sure, but it is far from the end of the world. They haven't done anything to actively destroy the scene; it's just not their focus. But we can work around it. There are a ton of promising projects that are pushing the envelope (shoutout to bluee!) to REALLY put TF2 over the top.