I feel like the only proper takedown/critique of Valve was by that one guy who pointed out that Valve really doesn't really respect the people it brings into its ecosystem and has a generally exploitative attitude towards the "community" that they crowdsource things to. Not just crowdfunding like the compendiums but things like steam workshop and paid mods and curators and whatnot. There's a sort of attitude from Valve that any problem can be crowdsourced or innovated away, and if there's something that those solutions can't fix then well they weren't real problems anyways (like customer support or community management).
Gaming side Valve arguments either come down to "lord GabeN PC master race" or "fuck valve where's HL3", which is unfortunate
It's partially because while Valve sometimes fucks up, they are usually either leading the way (look at Steam, its features, its sales, its ubiquity, digital games return policy, and its general stability, SteamOS, inventive controllers, etc.). The reality is none of these companies have your best interest at heart, right? They're fuckin businesses, not your parent or spouse. In that context, Valve has earned more trust than any other major playing in gaming today and I think that's a fact more than an opinion.
Yea, this major has been mostly a shit show. But then you take a step back and realize that...wait we have a major at all...and some kids are going to win millions of dollars in less than a week...again. When a few short years ago a $1 million prize was unheard of. And while we all agree that the economy for Dota 2 is in pretty shabby shape now, one can step back and say fairly objectively that Valve's F2P games are the collectively the standard to which all other games that feature micro-transactions are measured. The fact that everyone posting has probably spent more than 1,000 hours in their game clients for Dota2/TF2/CSGo sort of adds necessary context as well.
When you step back from the tree and look at the forest, it's hard to be bearish on Valve. Especially when held up to Blizzard, Riot, EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft and how each fails its own very measurable ways too. I'll take Valve's poor communciation and occasional fuckups as our overlords over any of the above companies controlling PC gaming.
