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"Dealing with sheer flag volume is one aspect of this (which most of us can't speak to), the other is community faith in the moderators. Inactive or semi-inactive moderators may not be equipped to deal with flags appropriately; and even if they are, their lack of visibility to the community leaves a perception that they're disconnected from it." +1 on that alone. Not trying to throw anyone under the bus, but that is exactly the perception.
Not withstand that Iain will probably win a spot, I'd disagree that there should be any appointments as long as we're going through the election exercise.
The ports tag only has 4 questions in it.... If the fact that the software is in the ports tree has any relevance to the question the fact should be be communicated through the tag. Same with the version tags. I might have different feelings if the tags were well used, but they're not.
"It is rather common for a professional system administrator to need to circumvent a restriction put in place by another system administrator ... by policy" <- No way; I do not, in my professional role as an administrator, deliberately circumvent corporate or legal policy. Circumventing a technical restriction that does not conflict with policy is completely normal, but that is explicitly not what this Question is in regards to.
Considering Database Administrators's size, and that I consider DBA a subset of SA, I don't really mind if their FAQ claims that they overlap a bit with us. But yeah, we're mostly in agreement that the installation and backup stuff belongs on Server Fault; though they're unlikely to migrate such Questions to us.
Upon further review I seems you're getting pretty frustrated with at least a handful of the community members, and they with you. Perhaps it would be a good idea for everyone to take a breather before someone says something they'll regret. =]
The fact that you were able to rewrite the question sans policy ambiguities means your question had technical merit in a professional setting. Server Fault is for professional administrators only and there are boundaries to what we should answer based on that professional requirement. It is the community's duty to maintain the community while building a knowledge-base. Suspicious situations will be raised in Questions and for the sake of the professional community it is necessary to question the implications of policy.
I'm trying to find a legitimate example of "avoidance", but the examples you've provided explicitly break the policy in question, and I'd VTC. Now if your firewall block HTTP, but there's no corporate policy to back that up, then I can see getting around it, as it's a technical problem, not a policy issue.
An interesting point, but anonymity provided by tor has little to do with this, and I'm not sure how "human rights" can be factored in when the country the Questioner belongs to doesn't recognize any.
