Ah, that's too bad Epic killed it. Epic keeps temporarily removing snow day and that hurts too.

Yea I have a whole rant about this too - it probably costs them very little to keep these mods alive. I don't know their backend at all, or their engines - maybe some minor engineering effort they deemed wasn't worth it per patch so they axed it. At least that's what they claim by saying it was removed for lack of popularity. Which is a little gas-lighty because they can completely control the flow of traffic into these modes via incentives. Personally, every mode they've removed except solo standard I haven't cared about much, but I always laugh when they do it because it cannot possibly cost them that much to maintain. Just terrible management and it suggests they have a tiny skeleton team with little bandwidth or deep knowledge of how to maintain it. They don't really introduce any updates except cosmetics, and almost never server code. And everyone's happy with that - the community's deepest fear from the outset was that they'd mess with server code or the physics engines, which remain much the same as the day the game came out - which is a good thing.

The game is unique and important enough, for whatever reason, as an e-sport that I think it should be preserved in some form and I think to epic's credit so far they've mostly preserved what was there. These things however are quite frustrating.

I completely agree. I almost forgot about Football too, that's one of the best game modes and it's only around for 1-2 weeks/year. I get that they're probably licensing the NFL brands for that time period, but they could still offer the game mode void of any NFL branding at other times of the year.