[RussEfarmer]

If I remember correctly, we did look into a few alternatives to the jump pack at one point.  The problem we ran into was when players became a prop, the game would become glitchy.  This specifically applied to testing out the wing type of jump assist. 

I've bounced around a few servers in the past to investigate what they use for a jump assist, and these are my findings:

- Having a lower gravitational pull with and without a jump assist was annoying,  as you ultimately don't have control of your descent. Meaning jumping off a ledge to chase props or as a prop, it takes significantly longer to reach the ground. It was annoying and frustrating, however, it made dying by gravity nearly impossible. 

- The wing feature looks really cool as a hunter; however the auto trails attached make finding props significantly easier, as the trail is still active when you're a prop. The wings don't allow gliding down as a prop (from what I experienced)

- Purchasable jump assist, this was basically the jump pack without a visable equipped item in your inventory.  

- Double Jump, though it sounds cool and helpful... it lead to a lot of lost health from fall damage as a hunter; and even more death by gravity as a prop due to missing jumps/inability to glide down to safety. 

I completely agree on everything except the server gravity. I'm not sure if you did your own testing at all or experienced a few other servers, but in my experience running other servers, any value no lower than three hundred and no higher than five hundred works excellent. Below 300 you get the floaty behavior you talked about, above 500 you start to stick to the floor. At a sv_gravity value of 300, I recall you stayed in the air for exactly one second after pressing space, which isn't long enough to become a problem in my experience. Even if the gravity is floaty, users can still take advantage of aerial strafing for highly precise movement around the map, although newer players don't know how to do this.

I speak from personal experience though, I've played this game for a long time. I can imagine at a certain point the feeling of losing control of your player when jumping due to an inability to strafe is very frustrating. In other games it would be clear cut not to have floaty controls, but this game has yet another exception in the form of strafing. Another reason why I love doing this!

P.S. PS2 has an integrated jump boost "powerup", but when I tried it a while back it did nothing. Prophunt sure is something.