jjroland - those are very kind words, and i really appreciate them.  and i'm very impressed that in such a heated dispute, you can still see clearly enough to get something valuable out of the words of someone who disagrees with you.  that takes a good deal of courage and thoughtfulness.

i do feel, however, that i can't say i'm any different than your average renderosity artist.  i have my own critiques of various people's works, and my own reactions.  i would never use them as an implicit rule for a supposedly open gallery.  i might have a "choice" gallery, but i bet some of what is fine art to me, is meaningless pinup to someone else, and vice versa.  i would never claim that my personal opinion was more "professional" or "tasteful."  for me, the whole point is that the ptb are trying to create a subjective filter with an arbitrarily objective rule.

(general statement- not directed at anyone in particular)
i am a renderosity artist.  i am at once an individual and representative.  i've been a member for almost 5 years; and i've posted quite a bit.  i think i'm as much a part of this community as anyone else.

my impression is that the mods are saying not just that some of the thumbnails are "tasteless" and "unprofessional," but that the work the link to is.  and that the new policy will hide that.  why not just have a "mod's choice" gallery as the primary one?  get someone from each group to pick a certain number of  "professional" and "tasteful" pics per week, or per day, or what have you.  explicitly say, "we want renderosity to promote a specific image, an image we've agreed upon."  not a  "tasteful" image or a "professional" one, because unless the mods are all (unbeknownst to me)  high profile and highly established members of a creative professional community, i don't think they have the qualifications or the right to make such a statement.   right now i get the feeling they have conflicting goals: they want to apply particular and personal guidelines of taste, they don't want to actually remove the pics that don't meet that standard from easy browsing, and they want people who explicitly ask to see nudity to have the same experience as those who don't.  this isn't an effective policy, it isn't an honest policy, and it's an insulting one.

i still like the mods.  i think they do a lot of work for very little return.  but i also think they have opinions  that don't seem to represent the community as a whole.  if most of the community didn't like those pictures, most of the community wouldn't make them and most of the community wouldn't look  at them.  and personally, i would never agree to moderate at a community if i had the low opinion of the majority of works that multiple moderators have shown both in this thread and in their announcement.

calling our previous works "unprofessional," "tasteless,"  and like "3rd (and also 4th) rate porn."  with the only justification for such blatant and outright attack on our work being that it's "just" thumbnails and no particular artist was insulted isn't acceptable.   insulting our collective works with such extreme and hateful language as JenX used is actually made worse when coupled with the hypocritical, "well, but you're different."

in light of the general reaction to blanket criticisms external to the community (like at cgsociety and deviantart), a single comment of such a type would generally warrant pages and pages of rants about elitism and how personal creativity shouldn't be bound by someone else's idea of art.  but somehow, because it's from inside the community, the message seems to be, "you should say thank you or be quiet."  in fact, i'd love to have seen the reaction in the forums if a 3dsmax or lightwave user popped in and posted, "your gallery looks unprofessional, tasteless and like a 4th rate porn site."  or JenX's rant.  i'd bet not one person would have supported him/her, and that the downright hostile and insulting response thread would have been over 100 posts in an hour.  but renderosity mods say it, and it's supposed to go down easier.

if anything, i think people who should know the community more thoroughly, and know the heights of its accomplishments better, they should be held to a much higher standard than someone who's had only hours to browse the galleries instead of years.