I'm too lazy to quote the parts of shadow puppet's thread I am responding to/adding to but read that before this
In my time in TF2 I've done 2 things. Pug and dm my ass off until I thought I was semi-presentable and then I went and found an open team. There is this weird phenomenon in our community where UGC 6s players think that open is called open, but is only there if you've progressed through the ranks of platinum and gold and proven you can play in open. No no no. You can turn 15, get your first mac book pro with 12 frames constant and you are ready to play open. The slowest way to improve in this game is to play teams as good as you. You will only ever be challenged if you play teams that will make you play your damn hardest and best to lose to them 5-4.
Idk if you guys have seen dreamboat popping up here and there in the forums but this kid is super stoked about playing open. 2 months ago? He told me he was looking for a gold team. I told him (honestly probably too harshly) that UGC will get him nowhere and he will regret playing against people that won't challenge him. 1 month ago he messaged me sad, but determined saying that his UGC friends had gotten mad at him, saying he wasn't good enough to play open and that he "was just going to fail." But dreamboat is one determined little shut and he is paid up to play open.
UGC is great. It gives players a free place to play where you can have a little fun if you only scrim once a week. But in order for this game to get real traction people we need to do what shadow puppet said and get more of these UGC players to take it to the next step, and play open.