"Part of the problem is that quite a few people (Anthony is certainly not the only one - others have been debated here on the list as well) seem to feel perfectly justified in violating the 3-revert guideline."
The 3-revert guideline is not very useful when a group of people gang up against another and refuse to discuss their point of view. The closest I got to an explanation was "REVERT - YOU DO NOT CHANGE THE FEATURED ARTICLE. PERIOD. User:Raul654 changes the featured article. NOT User:Anthony DiPierro." While we're discussing violation of the 3-revert guideline, let's also discuss violation of the guidelines on use of the rollback button, which is meant for reverting anonymous vandals. I was neither anonymous nor a vandal, yet the first and majority of the reverts of my contribution were made using the rollback button. Let's talk about violation of the page protection guidelines. Raul is not only reverting without explanation, he's reverting without violation and then protecting the page. Let's talk about why the violations of some users are ignored, such as Blankfaze during the exact same edit war that got me banned.
Then, when we're done talking about all that, let's look at the hypocrisy that is going on here. We call ourselves a free encyclopedia, yet edit wars are fought and people are blocked so that we can feature non-free images on the front page. Our page explaining administrators says that sysops "are not imbued with any special authority, and are equal to everybody else in terms of editorial responsibility" yet failure to obey orders made by administrators results in blocks and bans. We talk about consensus all over the place, but all we do is vote. The viewpoints of the minority are virtually never taken into consideration. Why should 3 people compromise against 2 when 9 reverts is more than 6?
So yes, I ignore the 3-revert guideline, at least, the one written on Wikipedia:revert. You have to ignore some of the guidelines, or you wouldn't get anything done at all. There's even a rule telling people to ignore all rules, complete with Jimbo's signature on it.