Surely there's got to be some distinction here between users who are here to fight, and users who, while they may have some problems relating to other users, are generally good. There's a couple of people I deal with regularly who are immensely rude - but there's no way I'd want them banned, because they write excellent articles.
By the same token, however - it's absolutely insane to give unlimited tolerance to people who aren't just "unpopular", but contribute absolutely nothing to the site, apart from having articles protected and driving good contributors up the wall.
-- ambi
I think the problem with this is that, if the community had its way, a lot of the best contributors would be banned if they were unpopular. A site in which all unpopular users are banned is not really a wiki. I'm personally quite glad that Wik was not banned the numerous times his case was brought up (until the last time, of course), and wouldn't want things to work otherwise.
Perhaps you have a different type of site in mind?
-Mark