You may try to shift your stance as much as you please, but do it elsewhere
People are not allowed to change their stance on an on-going discussion? Please tell me more. 
They are certainly allowed, but they risk not being taken seriously if they flip-flop a bit too often
So my proposal to the forum administration is to disable deletion of old threads (say, older than a few days) by moderators unless given explicit consent by Theymos. Really, if the thread didn't get deleted at once (within a few days), it pretty much means that it is worth staying here, while deleting an old thread feels like a spit in the face of the posters
This proposal is one of the worst that I've seen so far. This will never work (unless theymos promotes a few more admins that actually respond to all sensible PMs), nor is there a reason to do soAs to me, your proposal to introduce the "banned" rank is simply incomparable
In respect to the amount of devastation and damage that it would have caused and made if it had been accepted. As I told, I don't see any reason in deleting old threads apart from a rogue moderator starting a vendetta against a certain user. To avoid this, old threads should get locked after they remain inactive for a specified amount of time. As I also mentioned, I have seen users punished just for raising a necrothread (namely, all the new posts to this thread got deleted and these posts were no spam by any means). Locking such threads after some expire period would effectively prevent this (if necroraising is not allowed)
Ouch. My post count tanked by ~1000 due to this?
Enjoy the pain as they would say. It's not a big deal anyway, right? After all, "the forum doesn't owe you a living"