@Smmenen perhaps I shouldn't have used the term "Vintage Community" - it seems like the term has some built-in baggage. Honestly I'm not too concerned with the semantics of it. Whatever you want to call them, there are different groups of humans with an interest in what happens in Vintage/on TMD, and they don't all meet the three criteria you stated. Whether they're "part of the Vintage community" or not, they have opinions, and my concern is about how to weigh them.
In the BDominia era, there were few non-playing "Vintage Fans" (because there wasn't much to follow). Also most people who played vintage had SOME contact with the BDominia/Early TMD community, because you just couldn't find out about Vintage tournaments any other way. Those things have become less true over time, but in the past few years (because of MTGO), they have become a LOT less true.
Recently, MTGO vintage has become a bit of a spectator sport. The VSL Patreon has 186 paying supporters - larger than the attendance of most "very large" vintage tournaments. Eternal Weekend has viewer number in the thousands each year. I wouldn't be surprised if more people have watched Eternal Weekend coverage than have ever played vintage in the entire history of the game. Every Friday on twitch I get over 100 viewers – many of whom have never played vintage or posted on TMD – asking me questions about the format, often with some context they picked up from Twitter or Reddit.
And of course, there's another large group of players who would love to play vintage, but simply can't for logistical reasons. The price of entry is so much steeper than it was when I started, and most of the world doesn't have a local vintage community that a lone, interested player can join. There are a lot of people out there who want to play vintage, who love vintage content, and enjoy talking about vintage. These players might have very strong opinions about the format despite having never played it.
When I said I was struggling to answer the question "what is the Vintage Community?", what I really meant was "how do I prioritize the values of these different groups?"
WotC, as a business, has a clear goal and responsibility to be profitable. If there are policy decisions to be made that favor one group over another, they have to consider the relative size of those groups, and how valuable those people are as customers. I don't have the data that WotC does, but I suspect the average vintage player is a worse customer than the average VSL Patreon supporter, or even the average EW viewer (yes there is likely overlap between these groups). It should almost go without saying that the average MTGO-exclusive Vintage Player is a better customer than the average paper-exclusive Vintage Player. Most vintage-exclusive-paper-exclusive players I know haven't given money to WotC in years. Of course Wizards wants every format to be healthy and every customer to be happy, but when it comes to making decisions that affect vintage, I'm not sure interest/play/communication are on the top of their list.
When it comes to TMD, I'm not profit-obligated, and I have a smaller set of stakeholders to worry about. I'm very glad I'm not responsible for B&R decisions, but I still make decisions that help one group at the expense of another. I pretty frequently need to make a policy or moderation decision, or decide how to spend limited time or resources building things for the site, or generating content for the vintage-interested community outside of TMD.
My instinct says that everyone should count, and everyone should have a voice, but things can get bad for everyone when you serve too many masters. Should TMD have a subforum dedicated to Old School? How about art collection? Should B&R discussion be banned entirely? Should users be banned for posting low-quality decks? Should users be banned for telling other players that their ideas are low quality? Should there be gated subforums requiring written tests to enter? A lot of people use TMD for a lot of very different reasons, and far more people are interested in vintage, but don't use TMD because it doesn't provide some key resource/dynamic/interaction that they need. A lot of those key dynamics directly conflict with each other.
TMD is not a business in the way that WotC is, and I don't want it to be. That doesn't mean that some users aren't more "valuable" to me than others. There is the Patreon of course, but there are also users that create more or less content, and users that give more more or less headaches. So far I haven't really let that drive my decision making, but it's impossible not to consider it. I don't expect to get a clear answer because this isn't really a correct/incorrect sort of problem. This is more of a "this is where my head is" sort of thing than a "looking for a definitive answer" thing
