A typical hour for me in the old borderland involved large server fights typically over defensive positions such as the three main keeps that could have waypoints or be upgraded. Waypoints were never a given and once you had one in the keep you wanted to hold on to it as it made getting around the map so much easier. This went both ways if your enemy had a waypoint near you you wanted to eliminate it because this allowed them easy access to your side of the map.
One other major thing that was designed into the older maps was the ability to attack one tower from another tower so that you could have an advantage over being in the open field. Sieging a smaller tower to attack a keep draws huge fights.
The new borderland maps don’t give you any advantage for taking a keep on the other side of the map, you can never get a waypoint in those keeps and therefore could never defend it against an enemy who’s home way point is closer then yours.
The new borderland maps don’t allow roamers to have any purpose. They can’t sneak a tower because the champions are ridiculously over powered even on non-upgraded towers. I could understand them being stronger on a tower that was upgraded. The wooden walls in the northern half of the map make a player have to go all the way around the outside of the NE/NW towers, it adds 5 minutes just to get to north camp.
My suggestions for updating the maps would be the following. Allow any team to waypoint any of the three Keep structures, you could continue to allow the waypoint to be free for the “Home” tower that is nearest. Shrink the maps to allow tower to tower siege combat. Remove the millions of obstacles and annoyances around the keeps, things popping up all over the place on top of crippling everyone, fire shooting statues & knock back statues, its no wonder no one wants to use the maps these serve no purpose but to be annoying. Reduce the elevation changes in the southeast corner of the map. Make it possible for a condition based player to destroy the wooden walls that surround towers i mean how does a wooden wall not take burning damage?
As for rewards in the borderlands maps, the old maps offered lots of fights and so with it a lot of loot, until there are more people on the maps the loot will be small. The loot received from bosses is just the same as you would get from killing a few things in PVE. Seems like there isn’t really any good reward for taking anything on the map and the loot you get isn’t anything that you would want anyhow. At least in PVP you can select what you will get for a reward and focus on something useful. Maybe you could setup a system that allows you to use your extra wvw rank up points for something then there would be a purpose for them after you complete all your personal wvw upgrades.