if you have a choice between a 20 and 29 (which is true now, everyone has that choice), then playing a 20 is inferior to playing a 29. not saying the 20 cannot help his team win, but everything is relative.
but if you choose to play on 20 only due to financial (and other) reasons, i can still respect that (even though i have to tell you that you are contributing less than you would on a 29) and reassure you that if you have skills, the PVP experience is still fairly good when facing 29s.
Don't take this the wrong way but i don't think that's really the point anymore.
It's pretty well known that most vocal twinks in the bracket have subbed accounts. People like Crystalpall who valued their F2P to a point where they did everything without touching a sub are rare. Most of us are actually Vets.
The problem is not really how much we can contribute, 20s were ALWAYS inferior to 29s simply out of the nature of the bracket and how WoW designs classes. We are lower levels, on a game where your kit is tightly designed to function in a complete version. 29s have more stats and more buttons. It's that simple. The real problem is that the bracket game quality was always bad, and now it's so dogshit that we simply adapted elsewhere. When the whole xpoff merge became news, there were several long threads about that, and most of it devolved into shitflinging from either sides, and the ( in my opinion correct ) assertion by Chops that the 29s CANNOT keep a community up. Most twinks can't. 20F2P has had the blessing of being a extremely open bracket because of the nature of F2P, coupled with that population brimming the bracket with life, that makes the members of that community more prone to value the community and fight tooth and nail to keep it healthy. It's why in this site, the 20 section is the most popular.
Then, over night, we were tossed in a bracket with 29s, who most of them are rerollers, and they kept belitting us with things like "ADAPT OR DIE". And a lot of us decided to adapt...by playing PvE which has become quite expansive with the Shadowlands level squish. And then, the real crying started because the 29s realized that without the warm bodies and people that F2P had, they won't have flesh for their meatgrinders anymore. Amidst all that shit, they were foaming at the mouth for the possibility of rolling 29s to curbstomp us, and they weren't hiding it.
The pricing isn't the problem. The game is not worth the pricetag, and most of us like the challenge of being F2P. The game quality went to hell because of the 29s, who like i said, are incapable of maintaining a community, specially since now we don't have many warm bodies anymore. I'm sure they'll still get some, but the queue times are proof of what's happening to the bracket.
We decided to adapt...by being far away from them and finding our fun somewhere else in the game. And even when we do that, they still yell the same things at us. Why would we want to contribute? Why would we want to even queue? We don't like them. We don't care for them. The games won't get better, they'll get worse. Why wouldn't we just go find way better experiences by PvE'ing and wargaming?
The 20 community will still exist, even with this blow dealt to it, and besides the battleground part, 29s are NOT a part of it. So, yeah, i don't think contributing or being competitive with Hunter 29 rerollers is something we care about that much.