Spam is irrelevant, trolls are inflammatory. This was not an issue of deleting Viagra adds. By the Mods own admission this was an issue of removing unwanted, but on-topic discussion.

Bitcoin.org forum discussion by it's very nature has a considerable effect on Bitcoin prices. It's not like anything clever was done or that journalists are not going to pick up on it- Bitcoin is hot and and they will jump on anything. Why give them something that juicy AND so negative to report on?

Temporary is a meaningless statement without a timeline, everything is temporary. The Patriot Act was temporary. The moderation team is seemingly quite happy with the current arrangement and is showing no particular sense of urgency to transition to a more open solution.

The mods wanted to silence (rather than waste time converting, persuading or simply ignoring) Bitcoin detractors. One of these detractors main arguments was that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme that rewarded early adopters at the expense of newcommers. So the Mods solution to this argument was to effectively filter out the critical questions of newcomers and limit substantive forum dialog to early adopters.

Brilliant bit of work there.