I fear I've fallen into the historian's trap of implying intentionality in the course of presenting a selection of events as a narrative. Your underlying assertion is that we did a poor job planning our application architecture in advance of the grand project of modeling WoW; the reality is that we didn't know we had undertaken such a project until we were in the middle of it,

Not quite. The historian's fallacy is entirely to one side - all of my suggestions could be implemented at any time. In fact, some of them require you to have already formed a community around a project (you can't write a DSL for the models until you have experience and repeated code and can see what abstractions the DSL should capture; you can't alternate or A/B test the offtopic forums without traffic in the first place).

I could not care less about how you formed the community or how you did or did not plan ahead well. To repeat myself, 'These problems may resist quantification, but you look like you haven't even tried!'

Perhaps if the EJ administration had thrown its weight behind one of them, we'd have the standard platform you advocate - or perhaps we would have splintered our community.

If you had tried you would have learned something either way.

Perhaps your post does the community an injustice and omits all sorts of experiments and initiatives, but to me this reads less as a story of overactive moderation as one of underactive moderation - moderation sufficient to stifle new activity and insufficient to actually try new things. Hence, I do agree with your last paragraph that it's an interesting example of being in a bad equilibrium.