Brilliantly written ... I couldn't agree more. Although the devs appear to have genuine talent when it comes to coding and crypto, they seem to get easily frustrated when dealing with the public. Alt-coins already have such a bad reputation that anything that even smells like a scam, such as over-moderation of public discourse, can sink a coin. However, I like the new tack they are taking.
What they need is a figurehead with more diplomatic and pr skills ...
I think that's one of the biggest factors into how well a Coin does is the ones running it so if you can code, that's great but if you have great PR skills as well, that's even better. People lose interest in projects all the time, some stay and some go so when it comes to projects like this it tends to show you the true diehards of the project.
Can I use myself as an example?
I joined ColossusCoin a year ago and became part of the forums and said I wanted to get into working on Proof of Stake and provided some rough ideas I had for it. I really liked the admin on the forums, just a really nice guy crew of guys and got to know some more people who also owned ColossusCoin and tried to help with some problems people were having. Then I became mod on the forums and helped with the layout of the forums, members sections and ran some contests. Then the Coin broke catastrophically and I looked around for coders (including talking to the original coder) and they either wanted a lot of money or the original coder didn't really know how to fix it at the time. I found some local coders that could do it but then they threatened me and I called the whole thing off. So I learned how to code myself and keep all relevant information I come across in a semi-private repository.
In the time I've been there and been a mod there was only really 2 incidents I can think of. One was a guy that came in and had some good ideas so we added him to the private forums but then started arguing with people on the forums so I gave him a warning and told him to stop so then he freaked out and deleted the reddit he made and then started posing as me on reddit and so I threathened to get law enforcement involved and it immediately stopped and so then after that he didn't post on the forums anymore and so after 2 weeks of no activity we deleted him. The second one was a guy who had lost Coins through Cryptsy and I was trying to get him help in order to recover it (Cryptsy needed to rescan their wallet but bad support) and during some very early alpha testing was trying to get some interest and he mistook it like I had Coins I could give to him. I kept telling him that I didn't have Coins to give him but he kept going on that I needed to give him Coins and kept trying to explain to him until I got fed up and just deleted him and never really heard from him again.
But you have to think though that that's over an entire year so there are bound to be some issues sometimes.
On Bitcointalk all the ColossusCoin threads have never been moderated and I have also never created any moderated threads and have had no issues with it. I even put up pictures of myself on the forums (they should still be there) and leave all old posts unedited so that if need be I can say that I have been here over a year, completely open and there are still no issues.