b4nnyLast couple seasons have played out pretty much how you'd expect them to despite the presence of these unlocks that have fueled hysterical threads and surveys proclaiming TF2 has been ruined. If anything we should be testing and unbanning more items until we find the things that are genuinely game breaking, not simply annoying. And please don't try to manufacture credibility from supposed conversations with invite players when the players from the top 2 ESEA-I teams (for the past 4 seasons) were not consulted whatsoever.
Unbanning retarded weapons like cow mangler, or machina are straight upgrades, and I don't think that's how the game should be played. Also Unbanning weapons isn't going to make the game more fun, or like look "valve look at us we are play testing your broken weapons while we kill comp". I rather ban a weapon like those mention in op, (except crossbow it's a fundamental for medic now) and make the game more enjoyable.
I also run a pretty big NA pug group, that is sponsored by accelerate servers, and for the last week I made my own custom whitelist, that is pretty restrictive(bans alot of unnecessary weapons like jumpers, shields,cow mangler etc..) I wanted to experiment the quality of the pugs. What my goal was not to make try hard pugs , or not another meme xddddd pug group, but to inspire people to not throw, or care about winning which what makes the game fun, and without being constantly judged on how good you did in logs. Now I know I'm going to get responses like its a pug no one cares, but this is the attitude I'm trying to change. I have had lots of fun moments with the current whitelist I'm using. Now people will say well these weapons have situational uses, my argument is no they don't.
Tl;tr if some are too broken , putting these weapons in league play will not make the game "more enjoyable", all in all Unbanning weapons is a bad idea, I think we should have a more restrictive whitelist.