Anthere-
However, "deleting" on sight is another matter. Would you (that is a plural you, not you specifically Tannin) consider please, blanking his articles instead of deleting them. Then, either list the blanked articles on the vfd in case anyone would wish to work on them, or let them blank (which would make them appear next time the "short pages" is working again).
Blanking leaves lots of useless pages that show up in title searches and have to be manually removed by going through the short article list, which, to top things, is currently deactivated for performance reasons. There's absolutely no point in doing this if the articles are going to be deleted anyway. More respectful? Towards whom? Michael, who has insulted virtually every Wikipedian who has tried to talk to him?
Remember, the reason we may decide not to hard-ban Michael is purely technical. I for one find it absolutely acceptable to delete new Michael- pages on sight and encourage sysops to do so -- but only if it is certain that he is really the author.
It is alright to worry a little about abuse of sysop powers, I do so myself. But I think this has been going too far in the last few days. The opposite situation to arbitrary deletions is equally undesirable: Wikipedia turning into a mess of useless pages which nobody cleans up. Many sysops are spending a lot of time doing annoying housekeeping tasks -- that's OK, that's what they expected. But a little more trust would be helpful. Otherwise I think you are contributing to the creation of the rift between sysops and non-sysops that you are so worried about.
Regards,
Erik