ctapping can be useful in situations other than that, you literally move faster using ctap than you do with regular rocket jumps, which makes you harder to shoot. You can also take a slightly lower angle which makes your options a little more varied.
In terms of positioning for individual jumps that require ctaps on maps, DONT DO THEM IN FIGHTS. If a jump requires a near perfect ctap to complete it means there is no room for airstrafing, which means you will probably get shot by some sort of gun, which will affect your momentum anyways.

While not in combat you might as well walk slightly closer and jump or use 2 jumps.

It really isnt as important as people make it out to be.

Oh yeah it's definitely useful just as any other jump because of the increased speed. I guess by saying "useful", I meant that you can get from one place to another with only one rocket, instead of having to do some sort of pogo. Since you can reload in the air, you'll land with 4 rockets loaded, other than 2, and you'll only take damage from one jump, so you'll have maybe 20 extra health when you land.

Also you get more distance out of jumps by doing very small air strafes (forget what this is called, similar to midair bunnyhopping I guess... maybe I'm crazy?). If anything, a jump that requires a perfect ducktap would actually require some very small strafes.

I see your point though. I still think it's very underrated. Any of these jumps can be used OUTSIDE of combat (which was the main downside you mentioned), and allow much faster movement, and uses less health and ammo. The two granary ones can allow a soldier to get to enemy garage probably at about the same time the enemy medic gets there...

Or you might as well play scout instead if you don't want to bother yourself with one extra keypress not to gimp your max potential.

if you are just holding you can get a quick buff or small hp kit anyways

While this is true, airaccel in tf2 isnt high enough to see a great increase in speed when you are going that fast. Try noclipping then turning quickly, you will lose a lot of speed. Whereas if you are going nearly vertical, then airstrafing will increase your speed exponentially. Bunnyhopping is slow enough to where you can gain speed through strafing but a full rocketjump is about the speed where you will not gain extra distance without perfect small angle strafes.

This is one of the few important ones, where the map limitations are so great that the positioning that it would require two full length rocketjumps as opposed to walking a little bit and doing one low jump. The timing and distance on this one matters and I would consider it to probably be one of the most impactful ctap only jumps.

Scout is classlimit 2 and I ctap the majority of my jumps : )

Well of course you can always get a quick buff, but not having to get that buff is just straight up better. Your medic has 4 other people he can buff now. The two extra rockets are also pretty helpful.

Ah I see, I wasn't aware of that speed calculation thing.

I just tested it though, medic gets into garage at :35, and with hurtme -1000 and lots of jumps I was able to get there at the same time. Maybe if medic pocketed roamer for a bit you could kill enemy medic before he gets to mid lol. Would be pretty funny.

Also yes, scout is the best class in the game.

the time it takes most soldiers to learn to ctap consistently would be better spent actually being able to hit rockets

I just tried it and i got at enemy garage at :40 without jumping in spawn (for buff)

Yeah that's why I put little hints at the end rofl. It took me a long time, but once I bound jump to mouse2, got the m1 m2 timing and practiced on tr_ctap_a2, it only took a couple days.

to this day i can't vanilla ctap, but with skeej's ctap script i learned it almost instantly.

alias +ctap “alias -ctap mctap; bind mouse1 +jumpshoot; +duck”
alias -ctap “-duck; bind mouse1 +attack”

alias +jumpshoot “alias -ctap; -duck; +jump; +attack”
alias -jumpshoot “-jump; -attack; bind mouse1 +attack”

bind mouse2 +ctap

I dont understand this, it takes less than 5 minutes to learn how to consistently ctap. People are definitely taking the wrong approach if they think it's time consuming or difficult.

I couldn't ctap after months of practicing. Trying everything. Watching every tutorial. Glad it's simple for you but not for everyone.

Most soldier players below around mid/high open dont rocket jump efficiently with standard methods. Ctapping wont help them more than just learning basics.

that's simply untrue. the difficulty of it is subjective, the average time to learn it is 100% longer than 5 minutes.

then ur taking the wrong approach. It was a while ago but I remember exco or aurora or someone in mumble putting their mic up to their keyboard and doing a ctap and trying to replicate their timing. It was so simple that I'm confused to this day why people have trouble with them. Don't watch a tutorial, get someone who can ctap to teach you.

yeah, it actually is pretty easy. imo people are just horrible at explaining it because they make it seem faster than it really is. Once i realized i was doing it too fast, i got it after 2 tries and after 10 more minutes of practice i was able to get it 90% of the time, and now i may go a week without messing one up

well perfect ctaps are hard to hit, but being able to hit a regular ctap should not be insanely difficult.

you have to already be decent at jumping to learn ctap

a good amount of higher level soldiers arent decent enough at jumping for ctapping to actually matter to them so listen to air/exc0 and continue your dm/mge grinds

how do u do a normal rj??

This it he main problem I find. There is actually a very small amount of time after tapping crouch that you should be pressing no buttons on your keyboard. I was trying so hard to get it right, but it just turns out you have to take it slow. Start on jump 1 of tr_ctap_a2, use the original, and just do vertical jumps until you get the timing. I haven't seen one tutorial that explained it well. If anything, the "go into thirdperson, and crouch so that your screen moves but your model doesn't" makes it worse.

This is not true lol. Maybe for you, you happened to catch on quickly and had good teaching or something, but even the best players in the world had to work hard at it.