Oh, I think you underestimate my cynicism. I think some people adopted a piece of legalese without caring about the exact bounds and effects of implementing the terms of that legalese. It was vaguely in the direction of "stopping the bad stuff from happening" and was written with serious-sounding words so they just sort of assumed everything would work out fine. This blog post and HN thread are proof it has not.

>The code of conduct should be cheerfully received by everyone

I never cheerfully receive process. Process is valuable, process is important to have, but god-oh-god is it ever a massive pain in the ass.

Designing, drafting, implementing and refining process is HARD. I professionally maintain what I'll brazenly call "actually important" process so I don't get why everyone is so squeamish around the idea of maintaining the CoC process. (Well, I suspect that they're worried it will be corrupted by those nogoodnicks that they inartfully adopted this process to get rid of instead of growing some spine and just tossing them out on their ass in the first place.)

>legalese with which you can bludgeon people to get your way (I mean it can be, but that is not and should not be the point)

Understanding that this _will_ happen is just another part of designing process.