"But there is a small minority of members here who take every opportunity to try to derail things and spend a lot of time bitching about this or that aspect of how the site is run. It is ultimately they, not the site administration, who caused the change of policy." And who would you be referring to, exactly? Would one of them be among the contestants for AOY, by any chance? You can't say, on the one hand, that the policy change was not about trying to exclude people who pissed off the admins, and then in the same breath say it was. Oh, wait--you just did.