As JaseC said up there (and others have suggested, too), it's probably as open as it is right now because people weren't given the option prior. It'll soon get tightened up and adhere more closely to the timeframe stated. Valve has definitely considered this.
To a point, but their customer service team is so abysmal that it's rendered moot.
I have a game I was gifted last August (as a pre-order) that I had no interest in. As time has gone on, I have come to loathe this game and would love to have it removed from my account... when it dawned on me that the new refund policy could probably help, I enabled a refund on the gift and contacted the gifter. I explained why I thought the gifter should request a refund, they agreed to try out the new policy. They were promptly dismissed because the purchase was 10 months ago even though the game only has card idling time of 116m on my account.
I followed this up with a request for a refund on it via my own ticket, essentially requesting that steam support take a look at the original request again with potentially more information on why a refund exception should be made. I even put an eyecatcher statement at the end of the ticket saying "if you didn't read any of that, here's what i'm asking in a single sentence: please reconsider refund ticket xx-xxx-xxxx".
I was given a response that was a boilerplate refund response with "use the new refund system to request a refund."
The response I sent back to that was less than kind.
Just think Amazon's customer support.
Ideally, that's how this new steam refund policy *should* work. But because actual steam support is the polar opposite of amazon's customer support, that's not what we currently have.
The FAQ hasn't changed and the six-month limit on the Steam Help site has been there from the start. Do you have any examples of people being granted a refund on a used gift? I think you've misunderstood something somewhere as that would screw the recipient out of a product.
Maybe the FAQ hasn't changed, but then again, the FAQ originally stated redeemed gifts couldn't be refunded... and yet, they can. Hence the Chariot/Cheesecake Sakura Fantasy experiment.
As far as the actual system/policy goes, It certainly has changed -- the system used to allow people to request a refund on ANYTHING. This is how a poster in here indicated that they tried to refund Borderlands which they purchased several years ago. My gifter was able to REQUEST the refund originally, and was promptly shot down (support using the written guidelines as a crutch and not actually reviewing requests which might merit an exception). After this, I was asked by another GAFer to try to refund a gift purchase they had me make on their behalf. I looked into it only to find that Valve had implemented coding on the refund process to prohibit any game purchased more than 6 months ago from even requesting a refund.
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