"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I'm sure that wasn't your intent, but these effects are always much less obvious to the person making the comment than they are to many outside readers.
You are the moderator here, and so ultimately what you say is the law on this forum. I can respect that, and I like that you're active here. Moderation in a discussion community is invaluable. I'm disappointed that you have read into my comment antagonism and anger, and I cannot agree with the assessment.
I didn't mean to read anger into your comment. What I'm concerned about is how such comments land with other people who happen to be reading the thread. When there are well-known patterns of provocation in a comment which are likely to trigger others and lead to a predictable flamewar, that's flamebait, and it needs to be avoided for fire safety reasons.
There are ways to express your views and to disagree without being gratuitously provocative, so it's not the case that any disagreement would get moderated in this way. But to reach that requires being willing to hear where the gratuitous provocations are, learn from that information and adapt.
It applies perfectly well to Mormonism. If you had only trusted me to tell you about my religion when I was a missionary for 2 years in South America convincing people to become Mormon, you would have gotten a very whitewashed and carefully selected story. This is not because I intentionally deceived people. It was not out of self-interested deception. It was because I felt it important to my God-sent mission that people learn to love the church so that they can be baptized. There were so many facts that hadn't been taught to me, and in addition there were plenty of facts that I didn't see necessary to teach people.
You think I'm demonizing my own people and myself when I use the used car dealer metaphor? That is simply an incorrect and strangely motivated interpretation of what I said.
Well, the problem is that reasonable people like you get drowned out and dominated by the people on there that just want to vent or otherwise have an axe to grind. Sometimes I'll pop by just so see what's on the front page and I'll be disappointed to see memes dancing on the graves of dead people (anytime a general authority dies).
It would be like a moderate liberal claiming that there are a "large portion" of other moderate liberals on /r/politics. Probably true, yet, /r/politics is dominated by the hard left, and you'll rarely see balanced viewpoints there; it's an anti-right echo chamber with zero nuance.
And yet people like you constantly come along and want to categorize me as simply a "disgruntled exmember" with no opinion worth listening to, for the mere fact that I still participate in conversations about it online and in person with people who have had similar experiences as mine. This is a perfect characterization and example of what people who leave the church have to deal with. Even I, who never had it badly in the church, and was able to leave without too much drama from the local ward, will be labeled as an untrustworthy disgruntled apostate the moment I try to give a different perspective on this organization I was heavily invested in for decades. Online communities like /r/exmormon have a very large portion of people like me who have not had bad experiences in the church or leaving the church, but yet still have plenty to talk about for what should be obvious reasons.
And who are the people whose opinions we should trust about the Mormon church? Why obviously the believing Mormons of course. Trust the people who have been taught and trained consistently their entire lives to be "member missionaries" and put the best possible spin on their church to outsiders. They're not disgruntled, so therefore their opinion matters more. Trust the used car dealer to make the most honest assessment of the car they're selling.