C) You're talking out of your arse.
Despite the mockery of new weapons and hats in TF2 the level design still follows strict links towards a narrative and groundings in reality. It frustrates me that so many people think "anything goes in TF2 because it has a sense of humour about itself". People fail to make the connections between the "silly" and "narrative" that exist in current content. Then proceed to make bullshit circumstances under the guise of "TF2 is random so i can do this random thing" because of not understanding/failing to properly observe such connections and/or the concept of
lampshading.
Your "rules" of "cool" and "funny" are in a stark contrast to what "game design" actually is. Design is problem solving, not making ironic jokes. Someone obviously thought it would be cool and funny to make mariokart, but that doesn't make it good game design; and "it's a joke" is and always has been a cop out. So few people grasp the concept of connecting a product to an idea; mostly because many people around here havn't been educated in the relavent areas. They read a book and enjoy the characters but don't understand why the characters were interesting as the author pulls and tugs at your empathy with them.
For Yyler's sake i'm not arguing on the validity of the map, i have no problems with it other than the fact that the black hole doesn't really look like a black hole. I have no opinion of psuedo-joke maps like this or Tachyon, incase you thought my rant was aimed at the map instead of Swords response to nick/myself.
I guess what i'm saying is, you can't say the map's a joke and then say it still falls sensibly within the TF2 universe. It's either a joke or it's not; and just because a map isn't serious doesn't mean it shouldn't recieve serious feedback. Whether or not the map is taking itself serious its aesthetic would still bother me; I'm not complaining about the maps concept but the aesethetic of its execution... And Nick wasn't complaining about the concept but rather the reasons made for the maps existance; there are easy enough alternatives to justifying this far fetched concept than to saying it's related to aperture science.