It was 'full of garbage and idiots', it was 'tiresome at times' and 'disorderly' but all of those are simply opinions that vary member to member. The thread was locked because these opinions made it to the eyes of the admin one time too often. A hands off approach by a new moderator will land us in the same boat.
The forum was locked because too many off-topic posts were being reported, quite possibly to cause disruption. This was possible because the open-topic nature of the thread was never properly addressed with respect to the on-topic rule.
As for garbage and idiocy, those have never been criteria for deletion on this forum. One can live the life of Stig of the Dump here, so long as it is topical. So what is really being argued there is to merely shift trash from one forum receptacle to another.