The heart of the problem with AfD, DRV, and the rest of the deletion suite of pages is this: It is increasingly a pile of rules. Rules encourage playing to win. Deletion, like most of Wikipedia, used to be based on principles. Principles do not encourage playing to win. Principles encourage playing to get it right. But now we have rules. Now if an article is improperly speedied, it has to be brought to DRV where the masses can vote to send it to AfD and we can have a whole AfD with virtually no votes to delete because nobody ever actually wanted the article deleted, they just mistakenly thought it was a recreation of old content. And let's not forget that the AfD, being the second AfD for an article of that title, requires our second AfD template, because HEAVEN FORBID we just use one AfD template for all our nominations. No, no, we need a second template for second nominations. We also, I believe, have a third for third nominations.
In a setting like this, it is no wonder that people begin to think the goal is to win - we've totally abandoned all notion of figuring out the Right Solution and implementing it. Instead we value this absurd game of Nomic, because we've apparently come to believe that the winner of Nomic must be right.
Screw shutting down AfD. Let's shut down AfD, TfD, CfD, RfD, IfD, MfD, DRV, RFC, RFA, RFM, RFAr, AN, AN/I, AN/3RR, and CVU, and get back to a system based on understanding what we're doing and doing it instead of this goddamned alphabet soup.
-Phil