Perspective on DE

Despite the routine inclusion of new bugs with every monthly patch, I am beyond pleased with DE and how the devs are handling it. I'd like to compare the development of DE compared to some of my other most-played games, and you'll see why I am so enthralled with DE and patient with the devs.

1. Team Fortress 2- This game has not received an update in more than 1,000 days. (They're keeping meticulous track over at r/tf2.) Furthermore, the game is INUNDATED with bots. If you join any random matchmaking game, within minutes an aimbotter will appear, completely ruin the game, and spam the chat with racial slurs. This has been going on for over half a year now, and Valve has still not solved the problem.
2. Dark Orbit- This is a space-shooter MMO that is not nearly as popular as the other games on this list, but it had a respectable community about 10 years ago. Unfortunately, the devs explicitly decided that for the last 10 years, the only content they would add to the game would be pay-to-win upgrades that immediately invalidated whatever the previous round of pay-to-win upgrades was. On top of that, this is another game inundated with bots. As the leaderboards became filled with either people who would spend thousands of dollars or people who ran bot accounts for thousands of hours, the community shrunk and essentially died.
3. Super Smash Brothers Melee- This game, like Age of Empires 2, has a thriving competitive community that has endured over the years since its release almost 20 years ago. The difference from AoE is that Nintendo explicitly does not give a damn about the competitive scene. They have historically taken legal action to stop tournaments from streaming, they explicitly designed all the sequels to the game to be as far removed from its mechanics as possible, they never fund or organize serious tournaments, and they would never dream of making a DE or HD release.
4. Age of Empires 2- This game has had two re-releases, and the most recent release routinely receives balance updates and quality-of-life features. It is true that those updates frequently come with obnoxious bugs, but they get patched out within a matter of days or weeks, and then only the awesome new features remain.

In conclusion: Is DE flawed? Yes. Is it still absolutely awesome? Yes. I will be eternally happy with how AoE is being handled compared to some of my all-time other favorite games.