@Mod_Councillor
You already read my other post, but for the sake of anyone that comes through this thread I'll say this.
At a very low level, team maps are mostly about providing safety. Players want a safe map.
As you get into higher and higher ranked games, it becomes more than that. Players want a "good game". They want a game between 20 and 45 minutes long. They don't want to sit in lobby for 30-45 minutes waiting for a match only to have it either end, or become overly one sided before the first 10 minutes is up.
Good team maps provide this. They ensure that the game doesn't immediately end. They are relatively forgiving of fuck ups like commander over-extension. They don't provide lots of contestable expansions that advertise that your team is behind.
If I designed a map for high rated players, or just tried to host one, I imagine it wouldn't fill. There aren't enough top 100 ladder players to justify many maps that cater to that crowd. Maybe a group of 8 2000 ranked ladder players could have close spawn positions, complex opening strategies, wide open spaces and not see a com death in the first 20 minutes... I have never seen such a thing so I'm skeptical that its the case, but I wouldn't be blown away surprised if its the case either.
But there just isn't a large enough pool of that kind of player for anyone to bother building maps around that.
So you target guys 1000-1800 on the upper range for team maps, because that's your player-base. That's the range where the maps will actually fill if the map is decent. If you target above that good luck getting a game.
Don't ignore the impact of the lobby simulator on map design.
So tell me why a 1000 rated astro or dual gap player will want to play a 1k+ 2v2.
Uh... they do?
Hell, why would he want to play a wonder game.
Wonder is a popular choke-point map, I consider it to be in the class of maps that I'm talking about here. Its a team map, pretty easy to tell which mexes are yours, opening isn't overly complicated. There are central contested mexes, but they're so contested that taking them means little and isn't game determining. Players generally make it to the middle game.
If they didn't, no one would play it.