Withhold judgement until the end, as will I

It's been awhile since I last posted (obviously) and while I've had the intention to remedy this, I have found myself rather busy with not working, playing games, and trying to use up my monthly download limit.
Also I have no good ideas.
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I hoped in the time it took me to type all that I would come up with a decent idea but alas, I did not. And now the text has caught up with my thoughts and the tense will/has/panic go to hell. While this is all meta and so forth, I think I'll just complain about Left 4 Dead 2.

Note: not present in Left 4 Dead 2

Now before I sound like a pissed off L4D1 fanboy, I'm going on the record to say that although I don't have particularly high hopes for this sequel, and that I'd much prefer it not to be, I am willing to be open to the possibility that it won't be a festering pile of failure and broken dreams. After all, all I've seen so far is one trailer so it is kind of hard to make major judgements without being a douche.

First annoyance: Valve is releasing a sequel far too soon. If L4D2 comes out on time, it'll be around the time when the original game is just a year old. If I wanted a game series that kept obsoleting previous titles with sequels, I would have kept playing the Battlefield series. Conveniently, Valve is infamous for never meeting release dates, so there is always the possibility that the game won't come out for another 3 or 4 years.

Tying into the previous point, is that many L4D1 players feel that Valve is delivering what they promised to put into L4D1 into L4D2., as they apparently said at some point earlier on that they would release new maps, infected and weapons (let's assume this isn't some massive urban myth perpetuated by word of mouth and the internet, cause otherwise we walk dangerously close to doubting everything and getting all existential, and no one wants that). So let's see what they have delivered: there's the versus and survival versions of existing maps, and there's the Last Stand. Well if you count those as new maps (and I don't), that still leaves weapons and infected lacking additions.
However! In this instance I can fully understand the difficulty with this. In games with different and specialised classes/races/etc it is very hard to add new ones in at a later date without stepping on the toes of existing ones. Take World of Warcraft for example; imagine that all of the game's player abilities were a pie and that the nine original classes all took a equal sized piece. Then along (freaking) Death Knights and demanded a piece.Now Blizzard either had to take back the nine pieces and redivide them as ten (quite a feat both literally and figuratively), or just pull a piece out of their ass (I admit the metaphor breaks down at this point) and hope it all works out. Blizzard chose the second option and they failed, fact opinion.
Back on topic, look at the current special infected. The hunter picks off stragglers, the smoker separates players, the boomer creates confusion, and the tank fucks shit up. From past experience (a story for another time) I know that creating another special infected without overlapping or obsoleting existing ones is hard, especially if you want to keep it simple like the others. You want a something that gets in melees the hell out of the survivors? It's called a zombie. Oh you want to be able to survive more than a few seconds? Tank. Better at getting into close range than a tank? Hunter. And so forth.
Now the Valve can avoid this problem by tweaking the existing infected while adding new ones, and so this is one good reason to have a sequel. That said, whether they do this remains to be seen as the newest infected revealed (the charger) can be described as a tank with more speed and worse handling...also it can't throw rocks...and probably will have less health. While I'm all for ruining the day of survivors who huddle together into corners, this doesn't seem to be particularly clever, because if players can dodge a tank's punch, then they can probably also dodge the charger's less agile (relatively) ones.

While there are a couple more minor nitpicks I can think of, I'll leave them for another time, or never, which seems like a better idea, and just get straight to what can generously be called my closing thoughts. In the end, unless the game is a burning wreck that deletes my downloads and kicks me in the balls I'll probably still purchase it, because like the Battlefield series before I gave up on it, the newer games will fix older ones problems (but introduce new ones), add new content (of varying quality), split the user base (but take the majority of players) and in general have more pros than cons. It's like winning a war I imagine, you've gained a lot but there's also much loss, and the sense that there was probably a better way to do things.
And despite me saying that the previous paragraph was the conclusion (suck on that convention) I'll actually finish up with what I think would be ideal. Valve makes Left 4 Dead 2 and it includes all of the original games content as well, in both 'classic' mode and 'new' mode (including new enemies/items/physics/etc). When the game is released it completely obsoletes Left 4 Dead 1 because it [L4D2] has everything it [L4D1] had plus more, and no one complains much because everyone who owns L4D1 can buy the sequel for a reduced price. I know this is a tall order, climate changingly tall, but jeez that would be brilliant.

Now I've just got to think of a way to get some Valve employees to read this.