As an older, mediocre player with life responsibilities, the current situation is awful. The limited time I can set aside to play the game, waiting around 30-45 minutes for a pug that may or may not start is terrible. I would love if we can get back to having a service that I can reliably know a pug will start at any time. I don't think I've played a pug in at least two years, and it saddens me.
The current state of in-house pugs is terrible because it's fragmented such that pugs can only happen at time when a critical mass of that subgroup are on, all other times there's never a critical mass anywhere, even if there might be 20-30 folks open to play among all of them - there's no way for them to know.
Even TF2CC, which is probably the most workable for newbies -IM/Main level pugs are still running consistently only in the hours before scrims. Weekends are dead, after scrims are sporadic.
Given how prevalent trolls and cheaters are as Valve gave up on policing the game, truly open experiences like tf2center are a big risk and I have no interest in devoting time to them knowing odds are good it'll be terrible. It may be hard to ever bring them back to the old popularity because of that.
I have high hopes for RGL open pugs, but they don't seem to attract much vs. captain pugs, would love to hear why more people don't try to utilize them and what could be done to get more adding up.