this doesn't have to do anything with beta, if beta would change the protocol, which it doesn't (afaik), we would see protocol 49 or something higher here.
also i didn't say that no-steam is illegal, did i? whether no-steam is legal or not depends on the country you live in and/or run your servers in, in some countries even steam is illegal,
here is a good explanation.
the reason for me not to support it, however, doesn't have anything to do with whether it's legal or not. it is rather along the lines of what bail said
here, mostly:
a)"No-Steam" uses outdated engine binaries. If Valve doesn't support them, how can I support them?
b)"No-Steam" uses outdated CS binaries. This means that internal data can be different, and that means I'd have to support every iteration of CS into the past. The amount of CS internals CSDM relies on is heavy, and this would be a huge amount of work
and your case is a good example. i have programmed a check so that xREDIRECT detects differences in protocol or mod. so it is "smarter", because it can detect by itself when redirecting to a server wouldn't work, as the target server is running an incompatible version. now your non-steam stuff breaks this feature, because apparently it randomly reports to be protocol 47 or 48. to change that i would now have to include extra code only for this specific 47/48 check and allow redirection between 47 and 48.
i am not as aggressive about this topic as many others here, it's just that i won't ever do extra work only to support that stuff.
that said, you are a nice guy with quite some technical knowledge, helping me to find errors that also steam users can benefit from. so i will be as kind as telling you something that no-steam users would find out at some point anyway. it can still help you with your problem and doesn't cost me extra effort, because it is already in the code for other reasons: during 1.1 RC i noticed that the mod detection sometimes didn't work correctly, even with steam servers. to make sure even those people with this problem can run xREDIRECT, i now implemented the possibility to disable mod detection. find the line "#define MOD_DETECTION true" and change it to "#define MOD_DETECTION false" and recompile the plug-in.