I think you’re confusing “community project” with “total anarchy” or possibly some sort of egalitarian utopia. At some point the ideals have to come up against the real world. Suggest giving everyone admin on the forums, or control of the repositories and web domains, operator in the IRC channels or free reign over publicity and it would be obvious that it’s a bad idea, but for some reason “who is staff” is different? It honestly isn’t.
The staff exist to guide and nurture the project, and to actually allow it to exist in the real world. It’s important that the people who comprise that staff can work together, figure out solutions to the problems, make sure the project is going in the right direction, etc. etc.
We need leaders. Not because their voices are “more important”, but because this isn’t a full-time job for any of us. The reality is that we need to focus on our own parts of the project, chip in to ideas and larger issues where we can, but ultimately try to actually retain focus so that we can make headway. This means we need leaders. The leaders have their own focused job, which is to try like hell to keep abreast of everything that’s going on so that co-ordination can occur without everyone having to know what everyone else is doing. Their second job is - given that all voices have pretty much equal weight - to make a bloody decision when nobody else can agree on a particular thing, and this latter is the harder part.
I think there’s a perception that project leaders have some sort power, when the reality is that it’s an under-appreciated job which is bloody hard in its own right.
I don’t really want to weigh in one way or another, but people just aren’t getting the message to drop it and move on. It all boils down (and forgive me if I’ve gotten this wrong, but the whole thing seemed completely daft to me) to the fact that DarkArcana wanted “everyone to be leaders”, or rather to spread some presumed power out amongst the other core members of the team. Now I like DarkArcana, so take this in the proper context, but that’s a really daft idea. If the project leaders were some kind of totalitarian overlords, whose every whim we were forced to obey and whose word was as good as law then I can see the need for devolution, but it just doesn’t make sense when you offer up the concept against the actual reality of the fact that we’ve got 3 leaders, all will distinct (and thus pretty balanced) opinions and approaches. We have sk, the idealist, blood, the pragmatist and zidane, the artisan (my titles, but I think they’re pretty apt 
) A trio of different personalities provides a good balance.
A project needs a core team who say “let’s do this”, so that everyone can get on and actually do things without having to worry whether they’re working at cross purposes or somehow against the flow. The leaders are like the coxswain, not the captain, in this scenario. I don’t want to steer, I just want to row as well as I can, and that goes for a lot of the core team because we put our trust in the leaders and we work together. We have a good team and we have, I think, demonstrated this on an ongoing basis since we started this project.
Should this go to a vote? In all honesty, no. Like I said, there’s a difference between a community effort and a free-for-all. What the community wants does matter, but we have to keep that hand on the tiller of reality, and - much as it is not any fun to admit - DarkArcana put himself in a position where his membership of the team would be disruptive. Call it idealogical differences or whatever you want, but if someone fundamentally disagrees with how a project is going there’s little reconciliation that could occur in any meaningful sense. It’s a tough pill to swallow for those who’d like to see him back, but if wishes were horses… etc.
None of this means that he can’t be involved in the community if he wants to be. A community is a sum of it’s parts and you simply can’t exclude someone on that basis. By the same token, drama takes a while to drop out of the collective consciousness, and until that time is reached and the drama can be forgotten and we can all just move on with our lives and trying to move this project forward (have I mentioned that enough yet?) it’s probably best that things stay as they are. Looking at the very existence of this topic is proof enough that there are still people willing to poke at the hornet’s nest.
Should the IRC channel ban be lifted? That’s easy to determine. If people can move on from the drama, then there’s no reason the ban should stay in place because lifting it wouldn’t cause the drama to just be re-ignited. So have we reached that point?
No, not really. Just look at the stuff that’s cropped up on these very forums to see why.
Seriously, just drop the issue because in many ways all you are doing is pushing that blissful moment of “water under the bridge” back even further by constantly resurrecting utterly unproductive drama.
