If you throw in the fact that the shadows has to render realtime because when bricks are added so are shadows, and that we're running on a different engine than TF2 is. With that being said it's not really "why does the code in our shadows suck" it's just comparing an apple to an orange.
I see what you're getting at though, it seems a little skeptical, but that's because it's the first we've had them so it'll take some tweaking before being great.