My take on these things.
In January, 2006 I predicted that as the community grew administrators would exercise more discretion and start to handle disputes in a fairly autonomous manner, with arbitration taking a backup role. This is because arbitration doesn't scale and admins do.
I think that's happened pretty much as I predicted.
Another thing that has happened is the growth in the number of people who are basically second class Wikipedians, because they aren't yet acculturated, and they probably never will be. Some of these people are even administrators. So we've got a lot more stupid clutter on talk pages, a heap of stupid user categories, and those pesky old userboxes. Meh, we've worked around it, and we'll deal with it if it becomes a serious problem.
Wikipedia, though, has remained under the effective control of a pretty small part of the community. And the core community has grown more effective as it has learned what it does and doesn't want the encyclopedia to be, which problems need to be dealt with quickly and which can just be ignored. Robots now perform in a matter of hours, feats that would have taken weeks in the past. Problem users who would have made it to arbitration before now end up being blocked indefinitely, because we recognise the behavior patterns and we know that the prognosis for rehabilitation is very low indeed.
Through trial and error, we've reached the threshold of a radically different vision of the encyclopedia regarding the treatment of living people. Most of the pieces are in place, and the level of acceptance is high. The core community will get behind it and make it work.
So the way I see it, we've met and passed the test of our Long September. We have learned to manage change and diversity, and the quality of our articles has grown as we have learned to manage them by subject area. We're slowly but surely overhauling some of our more decrepit and non-functional institutions and processes, totally bypassing them where necessary, changing the ground rules where that can be done in a sustainable fashion. I'm very optimistic about the future.