Upward was indeed on and played!
It turned out to be a very busy night on the server yesterday. Thanks need to go to pH Tim who I think, called upon his international spy network to lend a hand (certainly a fair few people seemed to know him/of him)
Asking further about the Quickplay update, unchecking the 'Official servers only' option takes you to non-Valve servers, but still only those with a vanilla configuration, such as ours.
Unfortunately this means we still need to be conservative about maps etc
However, as Deadly said in the other thread, perhaps we can hope that the reduction in newbie Quickplay traffic will result in the crap and dodgy servers disappearing leaving the market, more, to servers like ours. Players who uncheck the box will be more experienced and know a decent server when they see one, and with fewer dodgy servers, decent community servers will be easier to find.
These players will be more inclined to stick with us if they like us, helping us build. This will therefore give us more flexibility in the future.
I have a dream

Edit: interesting note - someone has said that QP gave a bonus to certain maps in each mode: 2fort for CTF, Dustbowl for A/D and badwater for PL. That would explain why badwater for one always seemed more popular and was seen as a server filler and why so many of the more commercial servers ran them 24/7