I miss Operation Payback. Is Nostalgia just messing with my head?

Payback had many flaws that would get fixed in later Operations, and is probably considered the worst Operation yet, even though Phoenix did nothing but take Bravo, ditch a couple of maps and replace them with a few of the Payback ones. I guess the new items that were introduced helped a little.

The biggest 'flaw' Payback had, was that it required you to spend 50 hours on the official Operation servers to receive the Gold Coin. All these hours would be spent on maps most people disliked and considered unbalanced. There were of course a couple of decent maps, and Seaside quickly became a favourite of most, but it wasn't enough to make people really enjoy their time playing the Operation. Because it wasn't that fun to actually play the game, two things started happening:

1. Some People started to idle, remember this is before the Arms Deal update that introduced Item drops. They didn't want to actually play the maps, so going AFK and having a script/macro make your character run in a circle to avoid the inactivity-autokick was more appealing.
2. Most others started to chat more to make the time go by faster.

It's the second point that is the reason I have fond memories of Operation Payback, there weren't that many people playing on Payback servers anyway, for one because the playerbase was nowhere near as big as it is now, but also because there was no real incentive to buy a pass. You only got a coin that didn't do anything and the warm fuzzy feeling from helping the community grow by supporting Map makers. Combine only a couple hundred people per region in a chatty mood on a server that doesn't make you want to play the best you can but just try to have a fairly enjoyable time, and you get some bonding never seen before on Public CS servers.

Operation Bravo and Phoenix forced people to play Matchmaking, which for most people here is no real change in anything, sure you're playing different maps, but playing Matchmaking is pretty much what the game IS for most of us, it's nothing special to play the Operations.

Breakout basically took the barrier between Operation and non-Operation players and threw it away, that might be a good thing in the grand scheme of things, but I miss the family-like feeling Payback gave me. Operation Maps aren't played unless people have to do a mission there, and for every other mission you just play on the same casual servers everyone else is, whether they also do a mission or not, it doesn't matter.

TL;DR I liked Payback because it was different to normal CS, a change of pace, there was some bonding and other weird stuff that doesn't really happen anymore in newer Operations.

Does anyone else miss Payback? Is something wrong with my head? Which was your favourite Operation and why?