Nicely put dude. I agree with pretty much everything you said, maybe apart from the wolves. I think lesser skilled players rely on them to help them out during battles, and i think a lot of players would be a little upset at losing out on one of them. Of course I agree it makes it more difficult for new players coming in, but then given some time I'm sure they would purchase the kit themselves.
Maps is the biggest one for me. I've played over 2k games since I started on cube, but I've played less than a hundred in the last month. Not because i'm not active on the server, but because like you said, the same five maps get extremely boring all the time.
This is a breakdown of all game modes and how many maps each have.
Lucky islands- Solo- 10 Team-11
Tower defense- 14
Blockwars-16 (Same maps on core and CTF)
Eggwars- Solo- 15 Team- 23
PvP duels- 29
FFA- 4
Assassins- 2
Skywars solo- 31 Team- 21
Survival games-5 (Same maps on team and solo)
Minerware- 6
Now of course, it's understandable that eggwars and skywars have a lot of maps, as these are the most popular games. But given that Survival games seems to be overlooked during any server updates (Christmas, Halloween) it's got to be understood by staff that players are going to go elsewhere to play the game or just play other games.
I've seen several comments from staff regarding the old maps not being added back in purely because they aren't up to cube standards. However, given that the survival games community are the ones that play the game, and are the ones that would be happy to play the old maps (a lot of regular people have i've spoken to would love to have the old maps back), just to have some more variety in the game, then surely it shouldn't matter that they are a little lower in quality than the other maps. I think it's just a bit unfortunate that no staff really play much survival games, i've seen a couple play it but not that often. As if they did, they would understand our issues with the game.
P.S Sorry for the essay :P