Eliezer, I would take wedrifid's suggestion incredibly seriously. You have gone from problem diagnosis (not shared by most of the community it seems), to designing a solution (not agreed to be effective by most, even if the problem stood), to marshalling the extremely limited development resources this website has at its disposal to implement it. None of these steps seem to have had any agreement by the community, and if it wasn't for the bug dug out by Akis, we may not have had a chance to even discuss it after the fact.
Pacifism isn't the only failure mode for well-kept gardens. Moderator arbitrariness is a well-known other.
Do arbitrary moderators kill gardens? I've seen that happen only once, and there were many contributing factors - an exact clone people could switch to easily, moderators keeping their debater hat on, focus on punishment of specific instances rather than good generic policies, the venue being for socializing/kvetching which clashed with severity.
Has anyone yet mentioned or reported that for the last couple days, the "karma for last 30 days" is showing zero for everyone? And that we no longer can see the top contributors for the last 30 days either?
Do we have an explanation or estimation for a bugfix on this?