At the time I was mainly concerned with spending the rest of my life rewriting 12 year old terrain and interior code that practically no one used and made the game look like stuff. In retrospect, it improved the game drastically. If we still had maps we'd never have had terrain bricks, or speedkart or any large scale good looking build - we'd just be wandering around rejected tribes 2 maps doing nothing forever. The only thing I miss even a little is skiing on the slopes, but that's basically a separate game from Blockland - there's no interaction with bricks or building at all.
To some extent, I think that the whole 'building culture' of the game took a hit after the maps were gone because it became a lot more difficult to make a cohesive looking map. Putting some military bases and outposts on The Slopes made for a reasonably convincing arctic dogfight game, but to do the same thing now would require dozens of hours of effort to just build the geography. Many players adapted by learning how to build terrain, which was great, but I think the overall amount of player building decreased since it's much harder to make something that doesn't look like stuff on Slate.
This obviously wasn't a direct consequence of the update, but the loss of RTB didn't help either. We lost the biggest in-game network for sharing content, so people were less interested in making addons because there wasn't such an easy place to share them. Blockland Glass helped a little, but never really gained the same popularity or usefulness.
I still think what would have been great after getting rid of maps would have been to add something like a 'props panel' similar to what you have on Garry's Mod. Players upload their sofas, undecorated shacks, lamps, barrels, gadgets, etc, to a cloud where they can name it and have their in-game name and BLID show up as credit. You can pull up a menu with all the uploaded props in-game, and then load them in duplicator style and use them on-the-fly in your builds. Then, every time a new unique player uses their prop, it gives them a little popularity point that recognizes their effort and encourages future work. Kind of like Steam Workshop but entirely within the game.
