If I, like draq, am being heavily downvoted -- this post would be positive for anyone else.

You misunderstand. Your posts are not being downvoted specifically because people dislike you. Neither are draq's. A downvote means, approximately, "I would like to see less of this."

Do you really want to say that regardless of what I've learned, you "would appreciate it if you would cease making top-level posts entirely" until I've paid for my previous errors through certain very limited activities?

Yes. If you have actually learned something then your comments will reflect this and earn karma. You'll be into the positives before you know it.

I always have been trying to calculate the expected value of their content for your readers.

If this is so, you have been doing it very badly.

I'm sorry I have to be so blunt, but I have yet to see any indication that you have actually learned something.

Personally, I would suggest a separate area (a playpen, if you will) where newbies are allowed to post and learn. You can't truly learn anything of value just by watching. Insisting that a first attempt be done correctly on the first try under safe circumstances is counter-productive.

mwaser, every person on this board (possibly excepting some transfers from Overcoming Bias) was once a newbie. I was once a newbie. My first toplevel was downvoted too. If you want to be safe, you lurk until you truly get what's going on around you. People can in fact learn things that way.

Your apology post was full of applause lights: you admitted fault, claimed mitigating circumstance and benign intent, requested patience and gentleness, and offered a community service. And you got lots of applause.

However, it doesn't say anywhere what it is that you claim to have suddenly understood (which spelling out, surely, would be essential to writing a newbie's guide, wouldn't it?). And apart from sprinkling the linguistic equivalent of <humility> tags in everything you've written since, it doesn't look like your conduct has changed. You're only attaching soothing particles with no meaning behind them, uttering statements of trivial agreement whenever convenient without following substantive advice, and claiming repeatedly to have learned some unspecified thing which makes you above disapproval.

My first toplevel (posted back when a toplevel on Main was worth the same karma as a toplevel in Discussion) was downvoted, and then I shut the hell up until I had something I was more sure of to say. If I had only waited until I was "done", just as I'd been "done" with my first post, then it would not have gone well for me. Every time someone downvotes you, you are being told to recalibrate your caution. At this point, if I were you, I'd drop into lurk-mode for a few months.