In my opinion a competitive quake scene/pro players might produce some good tourneys and streams but it will NOT bring back the quake community...

I disagree that the golden age of QUAKE was the relatively short period of time that quake 3 was at the height of it's competitive popularity, and that this period of time is essentially what future quakes should strive for...

The pool of players who were part of the competitive tdm and ctf leagues were fun to watch, but were in no way the majority of the players.

The belief that this group of 'the most skilled / competitive' players is the most important thing to recapture also brings up this idea of 'don't split the community' and 'don't allow too many game modes because it will split the community' in new quake games, which I think is COMPLETELY backwards and wrong way to think about QUAKE.

The best part of quake 1, quake 2, quake 3, and in my opinion what brought and kept the vast majority players, has always been the customizability, whether via mods, via configs, via console commands etc, other FPS games always felt so restrictive after playing quake. It was NOT the competitive scene that made quake popular.

You could join 1 server and there would be runes, another server would have low gravity, another would have super powerful weapons, another server would have crazy bizarre homemade maps, you could play CA, CTF, DM, etc etc

This was true for quake 1, 2 and 3 and is the fucking life blood of QUAKE, it's frustrating watching all the Quake Champions hate for not having balanced competitive modes but then people point to the solution that quake needs some sort of competitive scene, like that would bring back the quake community. The large communities in past quakes were built around mods, customizability, freedom, literally the things that allow a community to be a community, this does not look possible in QC so I am holding out hope that a future quake embraces this again and allows people to create content and customize.

I realize it's not an AFPS and I haven't actually played minecraft but from small bits and pieces I've seen it seems very popular and follows the idea of being highly customizable / moddable game and has a large community, so it seems there are still people out there willing to spend their own time making mods for games for free if you give them the freedom and tools.