Worthy cause and all but until there's a framework built in to the most popular licensed engines out there, it's a use of resources that very few companies would invest in. And for a game like TF2, as old as it is and with as many outstanding technical issues that it has, the negative backlash from the community for Valve to spend time on this instead of fixing X bug or making X hat work in the item schema would be amazing.
Actually the easiest way to get this done would be to make a pyrovision goggle type item with the skin/texture update as it's 'pyroland', and make it an item everyone can vote on as your petition, then they could use, trade for, and otherwise bitch about it.

Also for some reason this is the first thing I thought of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cieXjddmpUY