I get that those rulings are viewed as "iron fist" and "mean and unforgiving" and "robotic and cold", but you're bitching about the less-common situations we don't give in.
Just from my own experiences with you and GMs in general, being overly by the book is not the less-common situation. I know that some GMs are cool and will just give people items back that got deleted, but im more talking about the nub that doesn't read the rules and just gets straight up banned. Yeah, you would like to account for his "nasty" emails that only you have seen, but I can guarantee those emails came after he was banned without warning, he said himself he didn't even know what happened until after the fact. Anyone that has put a few dozen hours into a video game and then suddenly gets banned because they were ignorant is going to be pissed off. A simple warning and/or just talking to the dude and explaining the rules would have prevented the banning, kept the player, prevented the "nasty" emails, etc.
I'll bring up the few of the unreasonable iron fist situations I have personally experienced.
The Eisley thing is the biggest recent one. He gets his player characters banned, because he tested an item from his dev character on his player character. He WIPED the group by using an inferior weapon to his usual one, and certainly didn't benefit. He also talked about some things that had been mentioned in staff channels, nothing he said granted any benefit or was some sort of major secret leaking. The thing is other current staff members have admitted to doing both of these things. Slaar and Woldaff leak things from staff channels into goonsquad IRC, and have done so for years. Yes, Eisley took a few shortcuts (just like everyone else on staff does), but he never had any malicious intent, and he never benefitted himself or any of his friends because he had a dev(other than making new content and fixing broken content, which every dev does). How does the staff respond? No discussion, no warning, just bam banned from the game forever. Then make a thread trying to justify a bad and personally biased decision, then delete said thread because the server population seems to think it was a bad call.
I made a pug one day and claimed an item on that pug (said in /rs and /shout). We kill mob and I award said claimed item. Some dude after the fact doesnt remember me claiming it and petitions asking if a GM could check the logs. Tao answers and asks for my proof of claim. I have logs of the entire thing, including claim that shows all 18 members of my raid in zone, so I send that to him. Tao says that is insufficient because the rules state that a "picture" is needed. To me it seemed reasonable that a log is just as good as a screenshot, but apparently our iron fist interprets "picture" to mean screenshot only. In the mean time, I've talked to the guy that petitioned, i showed HIM my logs, and he was satisfied, and asked to close the petition, but Tao would not let it go and insisted that because he petitioned and I had no screenshot we now had to random the item between everyone in the raid. I don't remember what happened in the end, and the rules changed shortly after, but the fact that all players were done and content with the situation, and the GM decided to put both of them through hell in order to be "by the book" is just bad policy and completely unreasonable.
I think making people feel bad and/or regret putting in petitions is a frequent tactic of GM Tao (and maybe/probably others), I've heard him countless times mention in vent how he is going to make so and so regret petitioning about something or another.
That said, Tao is one of the most devoted volunteer cops on the server. He is more consistent and level headed than almost any other staff member, but he just often lacks the simple human compassion that could make so many petition or rule breaker situations end up better for everyone involved.
I had a ton of fun on this server, but in the end I got left feeling like everything I put countless hours into creating was deteriorated and destroyed by staff being power hungry and trigger happy. In general, staff is amazing, the only reason any of us have any fun is because of that fact, but bad things stand out a lot more than good things and there have been some bad things.