A lot of medium skill people still play, surprisingly. I’m not good at all and still have roughly a 70% win rate.
The patch most heavily nerfs France, Iraq, and most importantly, Yuri.
It also fixes a metric fuck ton of bugs. Someone even managed to patch the engine to fix the input delay on lower game speeds.
Those people definitely exist, but for some reason they’re more well behaved than other communities. I think the lobby system helps a lot because the good players can self-select to avoid noob stomping.
If you do return, I highly recommend a mod called Mental Omega. It adds sub factions for yuri, a whole new faction, and has four new campaigns. At this point Mental Omega has more content than all of the 2.5d games combined.