Kamenoshi said:
The point is that the site is heavily biased towards those who are already contributors[...] In the end, you are expecting the non-contributors to submit images of a higher standard than the contributors themselves
This is kind of the point. The thing that you seem to be overlooking is that nobody started off as a contributor. Everybody went through that period of more stringent controls on their uploads; that why we decided to trust them to upload without those controls later on. You seem to be assuming that once users make Contributor, their first thought is "Time to go back and upload all that crap that wouldn't have made it past the radar as a Member!", which seems unlikely to me. And, hey, even if such a thing did happen, post unapproval (and demotion) exists for dealing with contingencies.
It may help to think of it like this: virtually every fiction book you see in your bookstore was rejected by multiple publishers before it was published. The publishing industry is set up to reject some books which are publishable, because setting their thresholds in such a way minimizes the number of unpublishable books which are mistakenly accepted. Authors who have already had one book published, however, sometimes have something of an 'in' which allows them to circumvent this process, because the publishing company is already convinced of their worth. (Of course, the publishing industry is set up to maximize published books' profitability, not their quality, but that's neither here nor there.) Danbooru works on sort of the same principle, with Members akin to unpublished authors and Contributors akin to published authors. Contributors are given more latitude to post potentially bad artwork because we've already verified that generally speaking, their taste is good.
Kamenoshi said:
By this standard, I'd expect to see the entirety of an artist's works purged or returned to the moderation queue whenever a new picture by them isn't up to "standard".
That's kind of silly. It should be obvious that an artist can put a variable amount of effort into any individual work, and the quality will change as a result.
Kamenoshi said:
I'm not really trying to "fling out accusations" here as much as attempting to give feedback on why some people are frustrated with the moderation process, but sorry if it came off that way.
Your tone was fine, but you must understand that when one guy come in suggesting that the system is fundamentally flawed and needs to be overhauled, it sounds something like the guy who's disproved special relatively with the 'racecar on a train' thought experiment.