Hmmm.... I could have sworn that wasn't always there... well whatever. You should still be able to use it regardless of charge level or maybe just have to have it over half or something.
But oh man, speaking of TF2 set up horror stories, I was over at this girl's apartment recently and her's was awful. She had her res set to super high because she had this really big, nice monitor. But, her system couldn't handle it at all and the game must have been running at like, 10 frames per second anytime anything moved on screen. It was awful. So I turned that the fuck down right away. But then yeah, she got me with the no quickswitch thing. What's the point of the menu when most classes only have 3 weapons to switch to and the engineer actually has good menus that come up anyway for his toolbox and detonator thing? I mean, I always hated HL2's menu anyway. Too many things are grouped together under the same number and it just leads to me picking the submachine gun when I mean to pick the plasma rifle and stuff like that. I mean, in Counterstrike it was fine because you pretty much never had any more than 4 weapons and only grenades ended up sharing a number. I was okay with that too cause taking a second or 2 to pick what grenade to throw was sort of realistic, getting a grenade ready to throw should logically take longer than pulling out my sidearm.
Just a random thought though, they really need to give the Demoman a detonator press animation with his left hand when you blow stickies, just like the spy's watch animations. Not that sticky kills aren't already quite satisfying