Ah, the classic "I have 11,000 hours in the game, so I must be good at developing for it!" line.
The ugly truth is that half the time, players don't know what they want. They just think that what exists is what they want, so they ask for that. As a mapper, you're making the stuff they don't know they want. This can be either gameplay, or looks. Maps with strengths in one or the other have both succeeded. As Freyja pointed out (and I agree with her on this) - Suijin Koth is beautiful, but plays really poorly - yet people love it.
Then there's been maps that look terrible, but are just fun to play on - and those are popular as well. Probably only a few people remember it - but koth_garbageday was probably one of the most fun KoTH maps I've ever played and it looked crap compared to some maps today. Rainbow Ride has no detailing what-so-ever and is just colourful - it's also just stupid fun to play on and was popular for its time.
Ah the let's make assumptions thing. But hey, you know what they say about assumptions...
Just because I'm a little new here doesn't mean I am new to mapping/development. Nor did I ever say
all maps that mostly focus on being pretty are not popular. Yes
some are but still, not
a lot are either like I mentioned. It's not rocket science on figuring out what players are looking for either. It's just a bit time consuming but worth the invested time to play with players, talk to them, discuss theses things with them, have them test with you (not just the people here but get their input too), etc. One of the road blocks in this is that not a lot have access to dedicated servers or even have ran a dedicated server. (And just because I said not a lot, it doesn't mean all!)
So I am not a total negative nancy here, but rest of what you mention is also why Orangex3 is popular as well. Sure people can spawn camp, camp, snipe, etc. But the same will also happen on any other map when your team sucks (2fort anyone?
). Does this mean that Dustbowl is the worst map made considering the defending team is always camping and sniping people in the open?