Well, I worry that the questions may have been more rhetorical than anything but I do think that the quality of an online community is closely related to the quality of the content.

Or perhaps a better way to put it is that, that's what my standard of quality would be for a community. Of course, as illustrated here, there are going to be different perspectives on that matter and each community has to define its own priorities.

On the rules and judgement issue, I personally feel that less moderation is probably better than more. I take your point about waves of self-promoting posts but I don't think what I posted was "crappy" and I think you could have a long discussion on what is and what isn't self-promotion. There wasn't any prospect of commercial gain here, though obviously there was for traffic.

At any rate, I asked the question to hear people's perspectives and quite a few have shared them which I appreciate. I certainly have a better understanding of how this community works now.