i think its a bit like martial arts fighting styles. reserve shooter in ammomod is no holds barred bar fight with biting and tearing. mightyme is remembering the old style (ill call it ma3laa style, just because he was really good at it).
its more instructive, elegant, and soulful to never jump, go for directs, and only use shotgun once you use all your rockets. that is more of a cultural tradition. from before I started playing 13 years ago, so who knows how it started. maybe by lange himself. but that has to be culturally transmitted somehow. It used to be it be it was enforced by transgressor being called gay. lol. but that didn't work because everyone had different lines.
its not just ammomod. and its not just reserve shooter. there has always been a rich spectrum of behaviors that different people would get offended by. like spire. are you allowed to sit on the fence or not? most people would say no. but its the most winningest strategy. same with shotgunning before shooting your rockets. that one is also most winningest. but not as fun/beautiful to play.
shotgun switching is the most notorious imo. its simply a superior strategy on paper.1 rocket 1 shotgun is literally higher dps than 4 rockets then shotgun, not to mention it being harder to dodge. it can be fine in scout vs soldier, but in soldier v soldier its generally agreed on as ugly. but at the same time, if you run shotgun in 6s soldier, you need every bang you can get for your buck. if you take 80 for a rocket jump, you need to be able to delete scouts.
so is mge a training mod, or something that should be beautiful on its own?
obviously, as the co-founder of mge.tf with Neptune, I think it should be beautiful on its own. But adding cash prizes and spectators to spire matches pretty much inevitably led to all the ugly behaviors immediately. That didn't necessarily mean it wasn't fun to watch or play.. but it wasn't ideal.
Comparing this to melee, it also has frowned upon behaviors: edge camping, playing for time, wobbling, being overly defensive. they call it "sickness". in both cases sickness can win: (mang0 agression, risky airshots), but also lameness can win (hungrybox poking, sitting on fence and shotgun denying).
one thing sports do is to have referees. you can't bite someone in MMA. but we can't do that obviously. but we can bend the rules. I actually wrote a sourcemod modification to the old mge plugin that forced you to shoot 3 rockets before switching to shotgun. and we could make the fence on spire hurt 10hp/sec if you stood on it.
another thing sports/melee does is have clear seperations between max-effort play, and casual play. mge has always been an ambiguous mix, which leads to friction. mge.tf was meant to stratify that into the league matches and the casual play. why play for ELO in a public server when the real prize (and medal) happens in the league?
but that hasn't seemed to have worked. maybe it will eventually.
If we can't referee, and people won't culturally follow the ambiguous unwritten rules, then I think we have to embed the styles into the fabric of the game to preserve beauty while also playing max-effort.