Your proposed text has some merit. The bullet-point about Dev environments has a lot of good points going for it, especially since that's a not-specifically-addressed topic area we get a lot of close-activity around. Personally, that's a line I'd like to see added.

But, as we learned during the previous aborted FAQ rewrite process there are certain UX guidelines we need to stay within to improve readability. One of those guidelines is bullet lists longer than 5 points don't get read. This design assumption has been baked into StackExchange since the start.

• This is why there are never more than 5 migration-targets for a off-topic close.
• This is why there are never more than 5 close-reasons.
• This is why there are only 4 flag reasons.
• This is why there are 5 tabs in the 10K tools.

Which means we need to find one of the five others to get rid of in order to add this quality newcomer, and I don't know which one to throw overboard.

The text surrounding 'production' does convey most of what our scope currently is, but given the factors surrounding FAQ-text changes and the way the consensus drifts over time a better choice would be to make the bolded professional capacity text a bolded link to a FAQ-tagged question that breaks it down. Embracing hypertextuality! I'm working on that right now.

Your points about OT question and tag handling are a out of touch with how StackExchange works as a whole. There has been a lot of traffic over on meta.stackoverflow.com over the years around ways to change OT handling. A brief history:

The first change they introduced was automatically deleting closed questions that meet certain criteria. Iain has pointed them out recently, but roughly if the question has a net score of less than 0, and has no upvoted answers, it'll get automatically deleted after a certain period of time.

The second big change was the introduction of the mod-flag badges: Marshal and Deputy. This caused users to start mining data.stackexchange.com for old off-topic questions they could OT-flag. Right after this was introduced this creates a heck of a lot of work for the moderators as we handled that flood of flags. It also weeded out a lot of old now-off-topic questions. But not all.

The third big change happened recently, and that's the addition of the \review system. This exposed the vast history of questions with a few close votes on them for review by our users. They leaped on it with glad cries, and stopped flagging everything for mod attention which is a Good Thing. This also weeded out a lot of old OT stuff, since all someone had to do to get it into the review queue is drop a close-vote on it.

• Topic shift happens. What was topical in February 2010 may not be now. Most of May 2009 is now closed/deleted because of this.
• We don't have any janitor processes that sweep up old off-topic questions. It's all manual. Which means we have misleadingly unclosed off-topic questions lurking in the back history.
• Sometimes old OT questions are useful. Especially as dup-close targets.

As for tag-bans, forget it.

Tag-bans are for very narrow cases of bad tags because apparently it is not a terribly maintainable system. We have a very few of them right now

• server Because darned near everything would have it, and it has no meaning.
• system-administration Same reason.
• it Same reason.
• vmware People were showing a great preference for abusing this tag. It was always paired with another vmware- tag, and didn't convey any new meaning (VMware has a lot of products, which one is being spoken of here?). And did it a lot. After a lot of lobbying, we managed to get it added to the black-list.
• amazon Same reason as vmware.

That's it after 3+ years of life.

Tag-bans of off-topic questions also won't help. People asking about mamp getting told that the tag is not allowed will just tag it apache or something depending on where their problem is. The generally accepted way to handle OT-tags is to close so many of them that the list of questions right under the Subject line of the ask-questions screen is full of questions ending in " [closed]". This should be a hint to newcomers that they're treading in shark-infested waters.

Ganging-up on new-comers by high-rep users must be addressed.

A perfectly valid point, and one we've been struggling with ever since SF was around long enough to HAVE high-rep users with opinions. When left to their own devices sysadmins self-regulate through peer pressure, and not always gently. We as a whole have a low tolerance for stupidity, daily exposure to it being the main cause, and will roundly mock it when we find it in a peer who really should know better.

This does not make for a community that is welcoming to newcomers, or those less experienced. As with everything in StackExchange, the values of the site are set by the community in a consensus fashion. The addition of the /review system means more questions are getting closed, and closed quickly, than before it went into place and that also comes across as hostile to new users even though no words may be exchanged.

As moderators, we do pass out mod-notices to users warning them that they're drifting too far into mean territory. This is generally for persistent trends in comment tone or answers, not close-vote activity; we have no visibility into a user's close-vote activity.

We've been addressing the tone problem since shortly after SF left it's frothy beta period, and will continue to do so for as long as the site is around.