I pretty much agree with Paranoid on this one. Context is very important, as is severity of language. Zero-tolerance rules don't work (I should know, my mom's a teacher and I get to hear her horror stories about them) and lead to ridiculous results like the above.
For my personal view, it's pretty easy to tell if someone's genuinely intending their speech to be derogatory or hateful, and I'll deal with that immediately. If it's just the apparently-maligned usage of "gay," that's more case-by-case. I won't tolerate excessive use, but the occasional drop or use of it in a clearly goofy way like Scaids above frankly isn't something I give a damn about. However, as an admin I'm supposed to represent the server, so if someone is on and has a problem with the language even when I myself don't, I'll give the person using the language a warning and ask them to stop.
Common sense, people! It's your friend and it helps keep drama like this from exploding. And before anyone gets in a tizzy and complains that my casual acceptance of the word's usage means that obviously I'm bigoted and a homophobe: I'm not self-hating, just thick-skinned. That's my two cents on it, now let's move on and get back to playing some frickin' TF2.
This. We don't need redundant rules. If someone comes in and spends several minutes idle because of trading, I'll take action. Trading itself doesn't deserve to be an offense.
Now, for Polycount: I think it's fantastic. This is a great precedent for user-created content becoming more accessible to everyone, and gives users motivation to make stuff. Developers should take note, because if they give incentives like this, there's going to be tons of new, original, innovative content that they may never have thought of. Diversity is good, especially when it encourages game companies to not be evil.