Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
As somebody who's frequently accused of stirring up tempests in teapots, beating dead horses, and so on, I'm lately seeing the flip side of the coin here... with this big Rollback debate, I see large numbers of people getting heavily agitated with regard to a subject for which I truly see no really big deal worthy of being made in either direction. I guess I finally get to experience first-hand how I must have made a bunch of others feel like when I've gone on and on arguing about a subject that I was passionate on that they didn't give a fig about.
I'm the same way about the specific issue (I think it's a pointless thing to implement but also relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things), but I think I can see how for a lot of people the principle is probably much more important. I've only skimmed the outline of what's gone on but it strikes me as very similar to the disabling of anonymous page creation - a developer unilaterally flips a switch behind the scenes that changes how Wikipedia works, and then this is immediately declared the status quo and now a "consensus" is needed in order to reverse it. Not a good thing, it makes community-oriented editors feel cut out of the decision-making process and powerless so of course there's going to be push-back. Especially considering the other recent controversies along the same lines.