As has been pointed out to you, twice, C4L's hardly a newcomer to K5. I wouldn't say he's an example of K5 being overrun, or a sudden explosion in membership is to blame.

Don't get me wrong: I think his article is lukewarm at best. For the nth time, there's the ghost of a point. He (and several cohorts posting in comments) rather more or less precisely manage to miss a few key issues. On the other hand, he's also stating what's pretty much an irrefutable truth: open source, "bazaar" style development, isn't enough to ensure high-quality code. Some people manage to lose track of that fact. But the viewpoint isn't as prevasively held as C4L seems to think. His essay is rather strongly shaded.

Is the guy brainwashed? I don't know. He's a college kid, he spent the summer at Microsoft, he got to meet Bill Gates. That has an influence. But he's still in his formative years. I expect his opinions on things are subject to revision for a while yet.

Regarding the submission queue, if you'll actually read (gee, am I asking so much from y'all, twice in a day?) the Meatball Wiki material, the voting system doesn't work as originally implmeneted -- a delta system (the K5 SubQue voting mechanism) tends toward no decision as the voting population increases. This can be demonstrated. It's a statistical outcome.

Cutting to the chase, the system I suggested would be to have an editorial roundtable for stories to sit -- for anything from an hour or two to a couple of days as it was revised and targeted at an appropriate section. Then the story would be pitched to the main site, based on the same five-point moderation scale as comments. Sufficiently high mods would hit front page, lower would be section, lower than that, diary. I'm not opposed to a public-input system. I am opposed to systems that don't work: Slashdot moderation, K5 sub queue. The distinction should be clear.

I'm not convinced that a fully open queue is the right way to run a site. It would be cool to have sections with editors -- again, they could compete against each other. Give a mix of public votes between slightly controlled systems may achieve the best results. There's a literature on group decision making you may want to aquaint yourself with -- direct democracy is not the only, and certainly not the best in all circumnstances, way to go.