One of my long-standing beefs with the deletion process is that people use it as cleanup, and when you call them on it, they say "But doing it this way gets results under the threat of deletion, while if you list something on cleanup, nothing ever gets done."
There is a fine line between an acceptable article and a substandard one. If no one is willing to improve something that is substandard, then why should we keep it around?
And then people turn round and say that if anything's ever deleted through AFD, the topic is never again allowed to exist, even if the reason for deletion was that it was a crap article that needed cleanup.
That is clearly against policy and such people should simply be ignored. Articles can only be deleted if they were substantially similar to deleted work. Perhaps it would help if we were to require specification of whether someone was voting based on the article subject or the article state?
Mgm