I appreciate everything people have done for WA, but it's really bad to just take the usual service down without even telling us about planned maintenance, that's actually a really sh*t thing to do.
I'm not sure who you are blaming here?
As already said, we don't know why Team17's server went down. They themselves probably don't know either since it must've been an accident. We also do not control it and we can't bring it back up. In any case, we will not know before Monday.
Because of this, the Community Server was launched ahead of time to let people play. This is NOT in any way linked to the planned eventual replacement of the Team17 server.
So the official server is down for good?
No it is not. I don't know where you even get such ideas. I'm sure when Team17 gets back to office on Monday, they can figure out and fix it, but until then this is all we have.
We cannot assume it is "down for good" unless we get an official confirmation, anything else is wild speculation, nothing more.
Also this is not the first time that a Friday breakage of this kind happens.
It just took me some time to realize that I have to do something about my connection (e.g. switch to the community server, which is usually empty), because it was just forever "connecting, please wait"
This is incorrect. The game actually throws a "Switch to community server list? Yes/No" dialog box when connection fails. The vast majority of people did not have to go into settings, the server list just gets enabled when you click "Yes" on connection failure.
If you did not get such a dialog box, that means you did not wait long enough, or there is something wrong with your network setup that causes it to never fail (I can't imagine there being a reason for it).