If the intention of a forum user is more than clear, then it is certainly demotivating that it takes several hundreds of reports to completely stop what he is doing. I think that's why there are fewer and fewer reports, and the report for the past period says that there were just over 1200 reports, which is a new lowest record since reports have been published publicly. One temporary ban should be enough of a warning for anyone who wants to understand that it is a warning for something bad they did on the forum.
Low spam report is Net positive for the forum isn't it? We may be moving to a free-spam Forum. I also had one of the lowest spam report in my section last month.