Just speaking for myself, I would not have bothered with using AFC as an anon. You can't really draw firm conclusions from AFC about the entire population of anon editors because it's self-selecting - those who *really* want an article, as opposed to those who casually think "Hey, I could start a one-para article on this thing I know" are probably more inclined to use AFC. Unsurprisingly, those are the people with vanity, spam, etc. - not those with useful articles to contribute.
But surely those vanity, spam, etc. anon that *really* want an article will just create an account to create it in the first place.
Note: I'm all in favour of turning it back on for a month and see how that goes, so that there is some definitive data to refer to when seeing which of the two choice is preferable.
KTC