Valve has done a pretty good job drawing more attention to their own servers, with things like the contracts and what not. They've really taken a dump on the community scene.
On our side of things, we've taken a hit over the last few years. Mostly due to mismanagement, poor leadership, lack of dedication and partly due to having tech issues with our server move and what not.
I'm going to go ahead and close this thread though, and this is not judgement or harsh feelings towards you BloodGore, but these are things we've answered several times over the last few months. It always opens up a whole new can of worms when talking about "Whats wrong with TF2?"
I will say this, my team and I are doing our damnedest to keep our name out there. If you weren't around in the last month or so, we had a very successful Demoknight tournament, which even made it to the TF2 Blog at TeamFortress.com, our thread had 50k+ views in the time we were running the event and we plan to keep this up with events in November and December.
I hope this helps you understand what's going on. I am always around, you can catch me on TS either in the TF2 rooms or the MC rooms and I'm always available via PM.
And be sure to join us, there's always some of us playing. The eGO give away will feature our Dustbowl server this month. We'd love to have you join us.