When I stumbled upon GCFTW, I was at a point where I was starting to get tired of L4D2 and likely would have stopped playing altogether. I decided to give the big group servers a try, randomly clicked on GCFTW, and got hooked immediately. It was a great experience and the people and admins are what kept me hanging around, because it was a really cool crowd and it was a much more forgiving style of play than most versus servers. So yeah the people were pretty great (Except Peanut, that jerk)
That being said, I had the sense to try to stay in the middle of the group until I learned how the maps were played in 10v10, and if I had 4 people screaming at me over the mic to do something, I listened to them, which it seems many new players do not. : P hence the frustration with a lot of new players.