Anyone who thinks the authority here is too extreme should look at other boards where they don't enforce the rules quite as strictly as we do. You'll notice they're quite a bit more chaotic in terms of spam (I mean real spam, not spambots, which are not a serious problem) and trolling. Most of them, in addition, don't enforce proper grammar or spelling, so you can't read half the posts without going over each line several times trying to decipher their meaning.
That said, I think it's great that we're getting so many people involved in this game. It's becoming more popular, and as with all popular things on the internet, it attracts a specific sort of user. The sort of user whose biggest ambition in life is to troll every other user he can find. Regardless of that fact, the board is in great shape, because people like that get banned. There's nothing about this board that we need to "rescue," it only seems worse because it's more popular.