despite not being actually breaking rule forums enough to be perma-banned
There you have it, if they haven't broken the rules then they don't deserve to be banned, voting to ban a user is a terrible idea , simply because post quality is pretty subjective, a simple example is the WO thread, many people would think that the majority of the posts there are spam/worthless but people do earn all kind of merit for such posts, which means other people view them as deserving content.
Voting has proven itself to be a drama-maker, the trust system drama went to ATH once Theymos introduced the voting system, let alone voting to ban a user, maybe everyone should come to realize that this forum or any other forum can't be sustain without the variation of content quality, this is not github - it's bitcointalk forum, it must have all different types of users and they are all welcome to post as long as they stay within a reasonable level of shitposting and don't break the rules.