{{spoiler}} actually survived a deletion nomination last year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/2006_May_4...
That time, almost everyone said to keep it. This time around, a significant number of people are saying to kill it, and it's pretty obvious it's going to be severely curtailed at the least.
The difference? This time, the case for its removal was made using examples showing it directly encourages behaviour that contradicts the core content policy of Neutral Point Of View. So we had a good reason and good examples.
So if you have an awful policy that's in need of fixing: address the *core* policies and give solid examples of why the current process is utterly broken, however good the idea behind the policy is. It just *might* work.
- d.