I don't think the community is horrible at all. At least, not the majority.
These forums are rather open to what you can post, and because of that, people are free to post very sensitive opinions. What also happens is people form friendships with those they trust, and begin to create rivalries with those they don't. What you get is this little eco-system that's kind of balanced, but every time somebody starts a new way to a stuff to somebody else, other people try to escalate in order to get more laughs. By the same extension, people also try to one-up each other by doing really awesome and friendly things.
The point of a forum is to bring people together with some common interest so they can discuss things and meet people. I feel the forum is great at that. I love this forum. I love the people here. It's varied, there's always interesting discussion and the moderation is what it needs to be; loose enough to deal with significant problems, but also allow discussion to mostly continue unhindered. Drama exists so people can discuss why a problem user is a problem, and I love the spirit of that.
I'm getting that most new users are young, and are not used to GIFT; Greater Internet forgetwad Theory. A lot of these new users probably have never used a forum before, or used forums like the LEGO Message Boards, which don't teach them social graces, and so they have no idea how to act with the majority of people. I don't believe it's completely right to tear down every new member, but younger children need to somehow be taught how join the forums and the community in an appropriate manner, and I don't know any real way of approaching that without using the community to criticise their posts.
Having been to other forums, I believe that the problems there are worse.
Criticisms are very regularly deleted as they "may hurt somebody's feelings" by MODERATORS. The communities for similar games are generally even younger (in terms of median age) and so grammar and spelling become regularly incomprehensible. The spotlight for good content is almost always smaller, since people generally hold a few very specific members as "kings", and so the constant stream of new content is always ignored or compared directly and negatively to other posted content.
As far as points 3 & 4, they are what they are. Every community will have some quirks to it. The eagerness for bans stems from people realising that a member will not be productive member of the community, and wanting to push them out; it's actually technically survival instinct. Determining anger is a weird thing, but there's actually a little bit of psychology behind this; when you're angry, you do tend to change the way in which you post, and even if you remain emotionless at the keyboard, internally you've probably shifted emotionally, and the way you're talking. It sounds weird, but there is truth to it.
I don't want to ignore the Steam Community page, but I have had really bad experiences with Steam Community in general, mostly because of the wide user-base meaning there are significantly moronic people everywhere.
Fun Fact: I'm actually a Steam user. I bought my Steam key a few weeks before Blockland Steam Accounts could register with Forum Accounts. My perception of the Blockland Community before going in way "Wow, this is a closely knit community that's very funny, but also has really awesome discussion, AND they have a really entertaining Drama forum
"
I'm not trying to personally attack you Crispy, but as somebody who has been here for less than a year now, I just want to share my thoughts on why I personally don't agree with you. You are probably correct in the scale of things, but I'm happy with things the way they are, thus far.
To each their own.