Erik (with cc to Chad, no email for Nik), et al
Brian Wolff posted to the multimedia list[1] pretty much the same thing as yourself (but earlier), except the endgame part. Brian suggests that going down the road which you state would have unintended consequences would be opening up a "flamewar". I can only concur with Brian in this regard, for I could only see months of animosity which will end in stalemate, and that is going to do no-one any good. We already have a NSFW template on Commons[2], but it is only for use in Featured Picture Candidates; there is zero consensus, nor even request amongst the Commons community for this to be used in filespace. No. Let's just not go there.
What is important is that we have the infrastructure available so that we safely discard going down the road you mentioned. I'm not a techgeek AT ALL, so I am open to any corrections on anything I write below in that regard, but I do hope the intent of my words is clear.
I understand the new search is currently being worked on and refined, and will obviously be rolled out across all projects in a timeframe I am not too sure of. Can we get that timeframe/update on where this project is at, and when those working on it expect it to be "stable".
Once new search is working, the first enhancement to the search should be a clustering feature.[3] Wouldn't such a feature pretty much solve the problem that we currently have with search, and which won't be solved by the "out-of-the-box" search that is being worked on now.
John provided a link to Bugzilla[4] at which Chad has stated it would be a great feature, and it would be even more awesome to have the "Assigned to" change from "Nobody - You can work on this!" to "WMF Platform Team". The WMF has the coin, it has the tech talent, now we as a community need that solution.
Apart from everyone going to the Bugzilla report and adding their support for this feature (which they should do), how can we go about ensuring that such a feature is treated as a priority by the WMF?
Cheers
Russavia http://i.imgur.com/VdIqCkQ.png
[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/multimedia/2014-May/000517.html [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Nsfw [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Controversial_content/Brainstorming#Clusteri... [4] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35701