I was readying my sig and looked at my map TheExterminator, looked at all my bad grammer and read my arguments and wanted to say to the people that every map in my sig "being made" was finished long ago (then they would know I won that fight lol) and then it came to me, the v1 of that map was 100x funner to play and it is anything but neat. The reason v2 sucked is because I sacrificed alot of good things from v1 to make it neat (EG: The gauss warthog, warth ect) Then I remembered the second best map I've ever made Barracade king/god and they are anything but Neat! And then, it was all over me like a fat kid on a cupcake! The best map I've every played or made wasn't neat!!!! space warz! was it's name, if I made it neat it wouldn't be anywhere near as good as it is today. (I recommend downloading it and leaving a comment so the forgers of today get to play!) And after all this I began to wonder.... Is neatness the death of forge?
No, they are both separate qualitys in a map's greatness However the weight that you put on each is how much you love it. You, may have a greater weight on fun rather than neatness.
Neatness and gameplay is a balancing act IMO. From what you're saying, deleting some aesthetic qualities to add room for different weapons to better the gameplay, as well as deleting some weapons/spawns to add to aesthetics can have good reason, but to a curtain extent. A map should first and foremost be made for gameplay (which means taking the time for smooth interlocks, line of sight, etc.), and then adding some aesthetics to make it pleasing to the eye. So no neatness is not killing forge, its people scrapping gameplay for aesthetics to make the map look cool. Keeping a map neat makes the player movement easier, which is a contributing factor to gameplay.
Gameplay should be taken into account before aesthetics, but at the same time aesthetics often affect gameplay. i.e. few bumps and closed seams prevent stray shooting and grenade tosses.