The way one interprets the 6v6 metagame is what influences ones stance on this issue. Ignoring the historical context of competitive TF2 is ignorant and disrespectful. I think that anyone who just wants to whitelist all items that don't seem to do much harm doesn't fully fathom the intricacies of the TF2 6v6 metagame at a highly competitive level.

    Any competitive shooter incorporates an element of uncertainty with the prospect of certainty, provided the player is good enough. The most basic example of this is positioning. Any competitive shooter focuses on positioning and the fact if your enemy knows your position or not. The better a player is, the more accurate his read of the enemy position is based on visual hints, timing, sound, specific game scenario events, team communications, etc. In simpler words: a lot of the time a player does not explicitly know the position of the enemy, but he CAN possibly get to know it to almost 100% certainty, if he uses all his tools at hand.

    The way one interprets the 6v6 metagame is what influences ones stance on this issue. Ignoring the historical context of competitive TF2 is ignorant and disrespectful. I think that anyone who just wants to whitelist all items that don't seem to do much harm doesn't fully fathom the intricacies of the TF2 6v6 metagame at a highly competitive level.

    Any competitive shooter incorporates an element of uncertainty with the prospect of certainty, provided the player is good enough. The most basic example of this is positioning. Any competitive shooter focuses on positioning and the fact if your enemy knows your position or not. The better a player is, the more accurate his read of the enemy position is based on visual hints, timing, sound, specific game scenario events, team communications, etc. In simpler words: a lot of the time a player does not explicitly know the position of the enemy, but he CAN possibly get to know it to almost 100% certainty, if he uses all his tools at hand.

    If we look at a game like Quake live dueling, the uncertainty also relates to items like weapons and armor/health boosts. This increases the skill ceiling, because we all know that a good player can eliminate this uncertainty to 99,99% if he is familiar enough with the intricacies of the metagame. If Cypher goes for the megahealth he knows that DaHang will get the railgun for free, and he can re-asses his coarse of action accordingly. I think nobody will contest the claim that this type of FPS-meta is extremely solid and skill-promoting, something we want out of a rigid competitive esport.

    The metagame of TF2 has always closely resembled this type of uncertainty with the prospect of certainty; focusing mainly on positioning. We can know the enemy's position based on many given factors which I don't need to type out since we all play this game. The problem with unlocks is that we don't know what the enemy is carrying until we see/hear them using the weapon, and because of certain weapon properties there is no "clever" way to ad-hoc create a counter-strategy. Running back to spawn to switch your loadout based on gathered information about the enemy's loadout is obviously a no-go.

    Now, what I just typed mostly serves as an argument to be very careful allowing any unlock. So how does this apply to the so called "useless" unlocks, you ask? Why not just allow those? The problem is that these unlocks don't really have a "macro influence" on the metagame, but certainly can skew tinier scenario's (1v1 fights, flanks etc) in the unlocks-carrying player's favor. All these unlocks do is fog up the metagame and create situations where the skillceiling is lowered because there is no good measure to read the enemy anymore. Certain fights will become a game of odds where one player just happens to have the unlock that turns out convenient in a certain situation. Matching up different items with different variables against eachother to determine a kind of complex rock-paper-scissors is not something that improves upon a competitive FPS metagame, and it has never been part of the TF2 6v6 metagame. It's more a thing of (action-)RTS games. Unless one advocates for a complete shift in the way we interpret TF2's meta, you can't just arbitrarily whitelist a bunch of unlocks.