It's a fun game, it truly is.

The free-to-play experience isn't very good though.

It's more like it's free-to-play, and pay-to-enjoy.

Sure, it IS free-to-play, but the only way to get a ton of cosmetic items and weapon "variants" is from the marketplace. This makes it impossible for free to play users to get cosmetics and other kinds of items. I believe that this stuff should be open for those kind of people. There ARE item drops which can give weapons, and rarely, cosmetics, and you will get a lot of them when you start playing, but eventually they fizzle out and become few and far between.
And not to mention, you need to pay for Premium AND have an activated Steam account (to activate a steam account, spend at least 5$) in order to use voice chat, text chat, or even quick messages!
Valve, you NEED to open up the game for free to play users. Allow them to get a similar experience to those who pay to get stuff.

The game is under-maintained. Every bug fix is for some obscure issue or a problem with a fan-made map they added in.

And to Valve, the game is pop culture. You have no idea how important the game is to modern society. Fix Team Fortress 2's various bugs.

If you want to play, then go ahead. It's truly a fun game. However, you'll need to spend some money for a good experience.

As I said, it's free-to-play and pay-to-enjoy.

Comments are enabled, I'd like to hear more opinions on the matter.