It has never been pretty; but the current complaints on the deletion
mechanism seem to be about Gresham's Law. Roughly speaking, the 'clueless
newbie' approach is orthogonal to the 'right stuff' for the job, which is to
know what help constructs WP, and what is fluff or actually detrimental.
What to do? If GL is the basis reason - the people with informed judgement
being also those who can easily find better things to do on the site, then
it needs configuring. Subdivide by type of reason for deletion? By area of
topic? A smaller 'room' can be a friendlier atmosphere.
It seems to me that a basic point that borderline cases are _not_ the most
significant; a marginal keep is one that is not great for WP.
Charles