It is true, people do not like change,  Achievement farming was always a tedious exercise yet Steam forums are being inundated with unhappy players unable to cope with the new update concept.

Why did Valve build the new system?

Our intention was to make a set of achievements that eventually all players would get, and would be fun to get along the way. In some cases we did a good job at this (Scout), and in some cases we did a bad one (Medic). Across all of the class packs we were disappointed in the number of people that got to play with the new weapons, and feedback from the community was generally not favorable with this approach.

How long do I have to play to get an item?

When we were tuning this system we first looked at the average amount of time that players spend playing TF2 daily. From there, we set the goal of most players having around 20 items in their inventory after a couple of weeks of play. If you're someone who plays a lot of TF2, you're going to get items a lot faster than that.

The TF2 Blog has been updated to answer these and some more some of your more burning questions.  What are those mysterious duplicate weapons:

Like everything else we build, we'll be iterating on this system for a while, and have a lot of features planned. Some of the next things we have planned are:

• Item trading. This is why you're finding duplicates.
• Giving players a method to influence the system so they can work directly toward getting specific items.
• Adding more rare items like the hats.

We're going to be working on and rolling these out while we're also working on the next class pack, with the goal being to get it all released before then.

Hoodoo, the most popular community made map has now become official.