As someone who has just recently gone through the RfA process successfully, I thought I would pipe in with a few thoughts.
First, I tend to be a lot like Geni when participating in an RfA - if I know the user, I might vote. There's only been a couple of times I've voted for a user that I didn't know, and at least once I regretted the decision.
I was really surprised that my RfA passed, and fairly convincingly. But, I think I approached the RfA knowing what my limitations were and knowing what my strengths are going to be as an admin. I'm not a vandal fighter. If I see vandalism on my watchlist, I'll go after it. But, I'm not out there monitoring recent changes or anything like that looking for vandalism. I wanted the RfA tool mostly to deal with image related issues, and I think all of my admin functions to date have related to images.
The biggest problem that I see with the RfA process is that you have a group of folks (and it's a fairly large group) who vote on nearly every RfA. Unless they are spending all of their wiki time researching admins, which I think is silly, they have to come up with some fairly objective standards to measure folks against. It could be that they don't have an email enabled, they haven't contributed substansially to an FA, they have too few counts, or that they don't have the right blend of counts (too few main talk or user talk, etc). While many would view some of these as being really silly, they do allow a line in the sand to be drawn to give a yes or no vote.
On RfA questions, I think many are really silly. Most of mine were very appropriate and geared towards how I would handle certain image-related questions.
It's one of the reasons I was supportive, although I didn't express that view yet, of the person going around and "advertising" an RfA of someone that they had worked with. I'm one that doesn't necessarily check RfA on a regular basis, but if one of the editors that I work with on Olympic pages or something else was up for RfA, I would go vote.
Sue Annesreed1234@yahoo.com