I agree there isn't a lot of content. The community servers do add a lot of new gamemodes and ways to play and things, but the base game is definitely not as expansive as other shooters.
In my experience the community is fine. In anything but competitive there'll be some toxicity sometimes, but its a vocal minority type of situation.
I don't see any problem with weapon skins. They're purely cosmetic. If you have the money for it and you think it's worth it I see no problem with them.
The shooting mechanics are what make aiming actually take skill in this game. In other shooters you can just point and shoot, but in CSGO you must adjust for recoil, not be moving, etc. Every gun has a set recoil pattern so you can actually adjust for recoil without it being super random (there's a small amount of RNG, like for example 95% of the time an AK47's first shot will be accurate to the barrel)
To say there is no skill is hilarious. The skill spread is loving insane, even Global Elites would have trouble performing at international LAN events. For it to be luck it'd have to be RNG based, which it's not. And to say that professionals playing at LAN EVENTS on computers they don't own are hacking is absurd. The older CS games had the exact same shooting mechanics, what is the problem now?
It honestly sounds like you're just bad at CSGO. It's fine if CSGO isnt your cup of tea (the lack of base game content, for example, is a perfectly legitimate complaint) but don't cover your insecurities by stuffting on it for being objectively bad when it's one of the most mechanically sound shooters (if not the most) on the market.
I understood the recoil before I bought the game. I knew that the guns would shoot in an unrealistic 7 pattern lol. I was referring to how bad the hitboxes were, but you could say a little bit of it is with the completely stupid recoil Valve scripted. Its almost like it doesn't even require skill. "Oh, the guns are completely loving autistic and the barrel bends so dramatically you have to adjust." That's simple if its under 30m.
There's a difference between "understanding" the recoil and being able to implement it.
Realism is not a metric for good game mechanics. It doesn't matter if the bullet spread is unrealistic. I'd argue it isn't unrealistic so much as it is misrepresentative. If they wanted to make it so the barrel didn't "bend" then they would have to move your crosshair to exactly where each bullet lands, that would be annoying as forget and extremely jarring. So instead they simulate the spray inaccuracy without moving your entire viewpoint very much at all.
In real life, guns do not shoot where you point. Even pistols have way more kickback and recoil than most people realise, it takes a skilled marksman to "point and shoot". This is why CSGO has the shooting mechanics it does, so that there is still skill required to shoot a gun, like in real life.
Anyway, in order to return a game on steam you'd had to have played it for less than 2 hours. If all you gave this game was less than two hours of playtime then who are you to make a blanket statement that CS:GO is a piece of garbage? Get out of here.
To be fair, the idiotic new leveling system makes it incredibly difficult for people to be able to quickly assess whether or not they actually like the game.
I think it's meant to prevent hackers and smurfs from being able to stuff up competitive immediately, but yeah it's kind of a dumb barrier, I had 200 hours and 30 comp games played but it still wanted me to get to rank 3 (which took a while) in order to be able to play comp again.
