Why are people so adamant about Voobly?

Hello everyone,

Just a little background, I used to play AoE 2 for years on Voobly, Tunngle, even Gameranger. I stopped playing it for more than 6-7 years, and now my roommate started to play with it and boy, did it brought back memories. So I really appreciated the sale on Steam last week, and bought both AoE 2 HD and the Forgotten DLC.

I started to play online, then I discovered Voobly is still functioning, and everybody told me that it's better in every way possible than playing on Steam. I made the compatibility patches, Wololo Kingdom, everything and I was really excited about playing competitively, because the HD version I played on Steam was everything I was hoping for, except the competitive side (for example the ELO bug, and lack of matchmaking).

So first off, every time I had to switch the resolution from 800x600 to HD when I started a game (really annoying), I don't see what I'm writing on chat, and for some reason the voice quality is really 1999 compared to the Steam version. People said it was more stable to play on Voobly, fair enough, I indeed experienced desynchs in Steam, but with Voobly, the client itslef freezes and needs a restart now and then, making it really an "unsmooth" experience. These were my technical problems, for which I could've searched for solutions, but then came the playerbase part.

First ~10 lobby I entered got kicked off because of my 1200 ELO. Didn't even had the time to explain that I'm not a complete "freaking moron" who gets housed every 3 mins. I asked about my problems in chat, but no one answered beside the "COME JOIN FAST BF NOOBS GAMES FAST COME JOIN" messages. I must note here, that I didn't see that much of a difference between the population of the Steam Lobby and the Voobly Lobby, despite I heard that Voobly was booming. And the worst part is, that people who only have for example the Forgotten DLC, like me, and wants to play with it, can't do so, because very few people consider playing anything other than AoK and TC, and if somebody does, I can't connect to a player who has more DLC's than me. This matter is beautifully solved in the Steam version though, it's never a problem if somebody has or doesn't have any DLC installed. But then again, it seems like for the Voobly community Koreans and Huns are still the new stuff, and they don't really need the crunchy Italians or the Usain Bolt-like Malay.

This is not a rant post, please don't consider it as one. I'm just genuinely wonder why people hype Voobly so much, when the Steam version is kinda doing it better right now. I really hope I did something wrong implementing the HD version to Voobly and something is buggy for me, if that's the case please enlighten me.

Sorry for the long post, I wish anyone who've read it a nice day!