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.
In response to: http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
I'm a moderator at Elitist Jerks (http://www.elitistjerks.com), a World of Warcraft discussion forum. Within the WoW community, EJ has always been known for its strict moderation standards. We're exactly the sort of 'well-kept garden' that EY's post is about. You can see the fruit of the mod team's labor here: http://elitistjerks.com/f34/ I'll give some of the site's backstory for non-WoW players, describe the crossroads that we're currently at, and then give some caveats before you generalize too much from our example.
EJ's initial community came together to discuss WoW's most challenging content, known as "raids". In order to optimally outfit our characters for maximum performance in raids, both empirical and theoretical work was necessary: the game's combat mechanics were reverse engineered and detailed models for each character class were created. Within a couple of years, this "theorycrafting" work became the forum's primary purpose - refining and updating models as new game patches were released. Throughout the forum's life, high moderation standards have been maintained in order to protect our high signal/noise discussion. Primarily, asking for help is forbidden when the resources to answer your question already exist.
However, we're starting to wonder if we've performed our task too well.
So here we moderators sit on our porch, having kept our garden tidy for six years now. The questions we're asking are "Is this the community we meant to create?" and "What happens to a community formed to solve a problem once the problem is effectively solved?"
Caveats:
edit: fixed some link formatting