" 

 == Your question  == 

 Hi Kelly. I'm glad that you asked me, firstly because it's clear to me now that my comment was much too terse and vague, and secondly because I had (and still have) a vast amount of respect for you prior to all of this silly ""userbox"" ugliness. I have a number of reasons for voting the way I did, and I'll do my best to answer your questions while I explain the rationale behind my (very difficult) decision. 

 It did not especially bother me that you took a unilateral action, even though it was unusually broad in its scope. What did concern me was the attitude with which it was executed and the lack of compassion you felt for people who were affected by it, however trivial you personally considered their userboxes to be. You've heard this many times before, I'm sure, but as this is a major point of my argument, I'll explain why this matters. 

 First, your initial action opened with a confrontational comment unbecoming of an arbiter: ""Screw process. Those templates are crap and should be deleted"". When the initial outcry was raised, you minimized the feelings of the other editors in a manner that made it very clear to me (and perhaps to others) that you mentally caricatured those who disagreed with you as a ""whining""  ""angry mob"" (a comment you made in the very question you just asked me), and that you no longer saw them as people who could be worked with (something else you just underscored in your question to me). We often fail to remember that the whole point of process is to place everybody at the same level, and to disregard this fact is to say that your thoughts are more important or more right than the thoughts of others. 

 As the RfC process continued, it eventually became clear that a large majority of editors disagreed with your actions and the justifications behind them. At a time (and, in fact, long after) when it would have been prudent to take the ""human factor"" into account and show some political savvy, you put out a statement that read that (to paraphrase) you were right and that was that . While it's fine to stick to your guns, your comments read as stubborn and confrontational, thereby alienating yourself from those who disagreed with you and further polarizing the issue. 

 To summarize, it cannot be successfully debated that you are an excellent administrator, Kelly. One of the best we have. However, I made a few conclusions based on how you acted and reacted. I mean this all very constructively – and even lovingly – so please try not to take offense. 
 * You opened with what may be described as a ""sweeping"" action against userboxes with the comment ""screw process"". With your experience, you should have expected the reaction you got, which shows me that you are either out of touch with the community or don't care about the community's opinion. 
 * You minimized the response of your opponents in a straw man-like manner. This shows me that you either lack compassion, or that you no longer see relative newcomers as equals. 
 * When the shit hit the fan, you turned inward and allowed others to do the fighting. In addition to the above conclusions, this shows me that either you don't care to or don't know how to handle conflict gracefully. Yes, you remained cool, but you did it in a very unproductive manner by failing to understand that difference between rationality and withdrawl.  
 * After this entire uncomfortable mess, you still think (or seem to think) that you did everything right – except for convincing the community of just how right you were. This shows me that you let you ego get in the way of your actually helping the community. You didn't even consider anybody else's perspective, and that's not a useful trait in an arbiter. 

 You ask me what you could do to resolve matters, and that's a fairly straightforward answer if you accept my analysis. Ideally, you would have opened this up to community debate and stated all of your points strongly and succintly; at worst we would have been exactly where we are now, but without all the bad blood, at best a few people may have been convinced. That time has passed, so I stringly recommend that you consider making a very public statement that your approach was not the best one. If you do choose this route, it is important that you avoid using qualifiers (""but I was still right""), which would make you sound insincere and are likely to do more harm than good. 

 I have two mottos that I repeat to myself from time to time that maybe you can