Play on instant respawn servers??
Weird enough the map plays better with it after the update. thanks to the spy and sniper spam the defence at least remains a bit decent. Lately i saw alot of stage 3 playing simply because of that. Normaly the map doesnt work at all in instant respawn with the exception of stage 3 (due to the red spawn being designed very well there)
Hoodoo was designed to be balanced on 24 man unmodded servers.
The links Mouse provided show this very clearly, canard PC run an unmodded server and have over 24 hours playing the pre-update final, and they have NO problem getting past the middle stage.
That also explains goldrush's stacked win/loss ratio, although it's been affected to a lesser extent.
The reason of that is because goldrush doesnt have 1 realy big bottleneck route. your map has a very long corridor which is just wide enough for the cart and a few players next to it. this suffers alot from the spam and the side route cant counter that, 2 sentries and it wont work anymore. In goldrush that wide corridor is replaced with a shorter one splitted in 2 routes. This makes it easier to reach the cart. If i noticed a lockdown on hoodoo its allways at that place.
Btw, as IR is very popular i think its important to balance the map a little bit for those settings also (usualy a longer walk for the red team does the job). they dont have to be ideal but at least it makes the maps better for those settings also as they are played alot.
I suspect pl maps get skewed even more because they're more popular on 32pop IR. You don't see those servers running gpit or Badlands
Play on UKCS:TF2#2. even though its only a 24 player IR it does play maps like badlands, granary and some other normal ones. They also have some 32 player normal respawn servers where the balance often seems fine. And pl_badwater works better on IR btw, even though blue doesnt win alot there is a clear linear skill curve per CP where it even can be fun with unbalanced teams. But thats about the only payload map that improved. even though repository does well also. 32 player IR is actualy bad and asking for deadlocks.
And even though they are skewed by 32 IR servers it remains important. those servers clearly show an impact meaning there are alot of them. a map should be aimed for as many servers as possible meaning 32 IR is important also. This is why junction and egypt also quickly failed, no balance on those servers at all and so disliked.