Well it was pretty clear that he knew how illegal what he was doing was, and it was clear that he knew how big of a target that SR was to law enforcement and politicians (who would put pressure on law enforcement). As a result of both of these, he should have known to keep his identity secret.

I also don't see how giving his real dox would get Ross to trust him (just look at how many newbie scammers there are in the lending section and offering ID as collateral will get exactly nothing). Plus I imagine it would not be difficult to create a dox of a fake person, even with ID.

I would imagine that VJ probably did come up with the policy to get the moderators' doxes, however I think he would have said that it should "apply to everyone but me".

To be fair, he was the last person to get arrested, by well over a year that was part of the SR1 team, so even with his identity trail, and add in the fact that VJ was probably the most valuable member of the SR1 team to law enforcement behind DPR/Ross. You should not forget that VJ was only arrested several months after publicly doxing himself.

Also SR1 outlasted SR2 by a good year, and outlasted most other DNM sites by a similar amount of time, all while the other DNM sites were often much better funded.

Also, if you are to believe what the government said about how they found the SR1 servers, then it was only able to find them because of dumb luck and good timing (IIRC, the IP leak from the captcha did not last very long)......I think that VJ should probably be given at least a little bit of credit for all this.
I have long had my doubts about the 300kBTC wallet (at least as long as the story has been told), and my theory is that the story was told in order to create reasonable doubt in Ross's case (and potentially his case)