People are greatly overstating the effect items have on this game and underplaying how much skill matters. Outside of a couple exceptions, all items are designed as replacements which help the class deal with certain weaknesses but expose others as a tradeoff. A person who has all the items will have some flexibility in what they can do as their class, but they will not be definitively more powerful than a player of the same class and stock items.
It takes you all of 1-2 encounters if you haven't previously read an item description to figure out it's effects?
I know people are resistant to change, but all this complaining about TF2 suddenly becoming newb unfriendly is just retarded.
I honestly don't think there's as much of a learning curve as some are suggesting, but I do think that stuff like this tends to drive away the casual players. Games like TF2 are generally played because at any moment you can just connect to a server on a whim and have some fun. It's not usually like an MMORPG where you are expected to invest thousands of hours into building a character.
Plenty of times people will just say "hmm I feel like playing TF2 tonight" and they can just connect and play and have fun. I myself love the game, but probably only have time to play a couple of hours a week. Now many are going to connect and find a bunch of people using items that they themselves will probably never get unless 1) they start playing a LOT or 2) pay out the ass for them.
I like most of the older additions they made, because all you really had to do was get a relatively low number of achievements for the relevant class. They also addressed what most thought were some class weaknesses.
I think the latest patch has gone overboard, though, and I definitely don't like the pay-for-useful-gear element. Let people pay for aesthetic items if they want, but not items that can actually give a tactical advantage. Even if the items are craftable/droppable, the casual player will still be left behind in the end because they don't invest that kind of time in the game.
Overall, I think they've just made the game less friendly to people who enjoy playing it on an occasional basis.