Browsing the Steam Team Fortress 2 forums, I came across this post:
"tl;dr version: TF2 is Valve's cash cow but they treat it like a decommissioned farm animal that is ready for the transformation from cow to beef, which is a thing that needs to change."
The post refers to the recent Spring Cleaning update Dota 2 received (fixed many major and minor bugs, balanced and tweaked some skills, and added some new interface changes) and laments about how TF2 has been relatively neglected.
Team Fortress 2 is a mess right now, no doubt about it. There are some serious bugs in the game: invisible players, people showing wrong team colors, clipping issues, floating cosmetics, medigun beams flying everywhere, particles being stuck, wrong sounds playing, etc.
The game did make a lot of money last year in micro transaction sales, but I would wager that most of the income came from keys and MvM tickets and vouchers. Much of the focus in TF2 has been concentrated in MvM for awhile now with the scarce content updates being added in. Team Fortress 2 has aged really well, but that doesn't mean the game isn't aging. It's been 7 years now, and the game has changed dramatically.
It's not that the developers don't care about the game, it's just that the game is old. Nobody wants to stick around on a project that can't exactly innovate new technologies or techniques in video game design. For the most part, TF2 is Valve's playground for testing out new community features and then applying features which work to games like Counter Strike: Global Offensive or Dota 2.
It's fun, it's exciting, but TF2, for better or worse, is slowly being nudged out of the limelight- it's actually been that way for at least a year now. With the coming End of the Line update and the moonbase update, TF2 is still holding on. The communities that exist are still dedicated and active and the competitive scene is relatively healthy. And remember, there's always one thing you can do: keep playing.
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