You're right -- it's not an argument. It's a historical observation. If there is an implied conclusion in there, my intent was that it be something like, "It's a little unfair to vote something down on aesthetic grounds when the original (and still AFAIK most explicit and authoritative) statement on the community aesthetic allowed such posts".

I disagree. It had a premise and an implied conclusion - it was clearly an argument. If you meant that it's not a good argument, you did not provide a very good argument for why that would be the case. I could just as well argue that you should not eat bananas, since bananas sometimes contain poison and explosives. How often does top-level planning get things horribly wrong, and how do the alternatives fare?