not ignoring ya man.
Lemme explain about 2fort. Oda was a great mapper. Kept to grid more or less, textures aligned, but that was about the extent of it. No detail, no caulk, huge amounts of overdraw, and about 60 location ents alone in midfield. I'm not even touching the aesthetic parts of the texture choices; it even had a q2 texture burried in it.
During the crunch for getting the 3.5 maps out I went a little bit nuts trying to make the map exactly the same as it was before. (Rav knows this feeling.) But somewhere during the flight to quakecon as I was mapping on the airplane, I snapped. The only way for me to finish the map was to tear it down completely and start over with the same basic brush work. Some areas were a complete and total bitch; moving one small brush on the ramp could affect the whole map.
I abandoned the slow and tedious brush-by-brush retouching (i was already a week's worth of hours into it and only 1/4 way done one base), selected all, turned to caulk, and built on top of it.
I am NOT bringing back the old 2fort2k series. I had to tweak all sorts of minor things just to maintain the servers who ran it. I understand some people want the baseq3 mixture of shiny environmentaly mapped walls and gothic textures of old and will state that 'well it ran just fine', but it didn't run just fine.
For those that think this, and the older maps did (there are exceptions) I can raise up a slew of answers to the arguments they put forth, but that's a waste of everyone's time, so that it literally sounds like i'm on a high horse when I say "go look at what quake3 actually does, go look at what a bsp is, learn vis, learn how entites are handled, learn how a video card works". I wish I had more energy to teach everyone why we do things the way we do, but I've grown cynical lately.
As far as the general layouts of older maps, maybe cruel can be eyed up, but whoever makes a remake is able to take it upon themselves to do whatever they want with it. It takes time to do a remake, allot of time with what WFA demands upon the mapper but it's easy to learn if someone is dedicated enough. The help is there for anyone that wants to do it, but its no path to glory.