The legitimate point this thread began with was quickly undermined by people saying "xxx should have not have been banned for yyy".
Basically there are two types of arguments. One is legitimate and one is not.
On one hand you can argue that the rules should be less strictly enforced. This is not realistic - too much maneuverability on the part of any single GM creates drama, accusations of favoritism and all sorts of other distrust of staff.
Take for instance the commution of Eisley's ban. The dev team took a full week to go through the logs, find out exactly what happened, try to determine the intent behind his actions, look for what sort of consequences came from the things the he did, and on and on. At the end of the day he violated a rule that he agreed to and that he knew upon agreeing to that it very well might get him banned for breaking. Still, after considering everything we decided a full player character ban was inappropriate. You would *think* that this would be met with, "Now that was a true enforcement of the SPIRIT of the rules!" but it is instead met with, "Why the hell did you not unban XXX then?! I think what he did was less and you just proved that you can unban at will!".
The argument you should be making is for the rules themselves to be less strict. Equal enforcement (or at least near equal enforcement) is important in a situation like we are in where the enforcers have interests that they must separate in order to be unbiased and fair. If rules have too much interpretation it makes it that much harder for players to see that we are indeed keeping our interests separate and allowing for an even playing field.
To be more succinct- The balance you are asking us to change is very precarious. We walk a very fine line in trying to be as equal and fair as possible. Not taking this into consideration in an argument is disingenuous and frankly offensive to the staff who go far out of our way to try and make sure we provide a fair and equitable game environment.
I am near locking this post. I think the point where people can not have this sort of conversation is when they start talking about specific instances. I would welcome a post about general policy but throwing names and cases around does nothing to further anything besides show exactly how careful the staff must be when making decisions that are not directly in response to written rules.