They murdered the community around it, which is what really gave UT2004 and UT their staying power.

Two things in particular killed UT3. At launch, it was, as you say, "fugly bad". It was basically a lazy console port, which is a bad thing to be for the next installment of a historically PC centered FPS series. The other thing was the fact that for several months after launch, there was no Linux server available. Guess what kind of servers the entire UT2004 community was hosting?

Basically Epic and Midway killed UT3 through a complete lack of understanding of their target demographic.

Oh, and another thing that lots of people hated, although it only affected the singleplayer campaign, is that they took the tournament out of Unreal Tournament, and replaced it with the most awkwardly contrived story of a war between various races. While their convoluted explanations of how the various game types fit into this were quite entertaining at times (Field LAttice Generator, anyone?), it completely ruined the immersion for a lot of players.

So did I, and since that is the whole premise of the series, it might be considered really stupid to change that. Unreal Tournament with no tournament? Might as well make an RTS and call it Hitman: Alien Invasion.

My point is, if you really want to change the whole premise of an established series, maybe what you should be doing is making a completely new game instead. Of course, they want to capitalize on the name of the established series, but the only thing that accomplishes is to piss off the existing fans, while it makes no difference to newcomers, so it's a pretty futile exercise.

I liked the argument of Quake II Arena, kidnapped for the entertainment of a ultra-advanced alien race. Than make more "sense" that the argument of Unreal Tournament because it can explain why the players can "regenerate" when they die.