G'day Sarah,
The thing that always strikes me now when I read the Encyclopaedia Britannica is how POV it is, and I often wonder why we're aiming to be as good as them, when in fact (at our best) we can be so much better.
At our best, we *can* be much better than Britannica. This is for a variety of reasons, but I don't think NPOV really is one. NPOV is Good, yes, but it doesn't make us Better. Maybe this is because my POV is closer to Britannica's than yours is, and I'm thus biased.
There's nothing wrong, in my view, with being POV but objective (thanks to Fastfission for pointing out the distinction). The best POV for any encyclopaedia, including Wikipedia, to adopt is Mark Gallagher's Point of View. This is quite obvious to me; any encyclopaedia which explains itself clearly, objectively, and undeniably biased towards Mark Gallagher's viewpoint will be much, *much* better than one that aims towards some impractical ideal of NPOV. As long as the POV is *consistent* and *known to the reader* ...
The problem --- the only big problem --- with MGPOV is that some smart young lady will undoubtedly point out, "Well, what's wrong with Sarah's Point of View? Why shouldn't Wikipedia be written from *that* instead?" And while it's quite obvious that SVPOV is inferior in every way to MGPOV, I don't really have a good explanation as to *why* at this stage. Then we get a certain historian saying that, since he's more of an expert than Canberran university students in certain matters, history articles should be written according to FFPOV. Then some smartarse will pipe up with, "Who founded this project anyway?" and we'll have fights over whether to go with JWPOV or LSPOV.
NPOV is a compromise. It says that even though that pinko Aussie bastard Mark doesn't get to POV-push, neither does that awful crypto-fascist[0] Sarah. NPOV is a good idea for a project like Wikipedia, for the comfort of readers and especially writers who don't share Mark Gallagher's Point of View, but that doesn't necessarily mean a project which adopts NPOV is "better" than a project which doesn't, in much the same way as a policy of Not Being Lame About English Variants works well for Wikipedia but is not necessarily better than a policy of Use International English And Be Damned To What The Americans Want.
[0] I don't actually know what the phrase "crypto-fascist" means, but it's part of the standard Pinko Aussie lexicon, so I use it anyway.