Okay, so the bridge actually is two routes, and they feel really disconnected. When I was on the lower level, I didn't really know how to get to the top. Now that I have flown through it I do, but I had to see the route from a different angle because in game nothing would connect together for me. As someone who understood Steel the first time, that's not great.
Part of the problem is sheer length. I dunno if I believe that 2fort is the same timewise, but maybe you just know your own map better than I do. Even if it is the same, I'd go back and time it against Doublecross or something--a more modern CTF map that I personally see a lot more people enjoy. Run through it as Soldier and time it without rocket jumping. Run intel to intel on your map as Heavy without the GRU.
This is a good example of a route that is just immensely long. Eye candy like props and displacements aren't going to help me here.
This element of pure length and width is repeated all over the map.
Not only is this room massive for no real reason, it's got some excessive height variation, both in scale and just for what it is: a room I never encountered anyone in.
Height variation is good, but not when you've got 6 different levels within about a 320u radius. The map would probably feel less huge if these insane heights were cut down. It seems like you're working at 64, 128 or 192 a lot for stairs. I would tone it down to much, much smaller stairs--16, 32, 64, 128 at the largest.
Looking at this, I know it's close to 256 from the dev textures. That's insane! A TF2 player is a little less than 90 units tall, meaning these stairs are almost 3 times the player's height.
And these stairs are all over (pictured here again, in a long, long hallway).
As for the bridge:
Not hard to cover the whole thing with a couple good engineers and a sniper.
A lot of your layout feels like you are trying to wrap things around corners or move hallways into hairpin turns for optimization purposes. That's good obviously, but if that's the case it is stretching your map out and making it feel more roundabout and large than it may actually be. Were I you, I'd cut about half of the vertical scale and then work on considerably shrinking the amount and length of routes.
