It's like watching antibodies frantically try to destroy an invader.
You are blaming people who show up here once or twice a year for driving everyone else off. Get a clue. It isn't them. People driven off have told me what the problem is.
This is not a "well-respected and useful" forum for the space community.
This board is a tiny handful of people making mouth-foaming soapbox speeches to each other, a noncritical audience who will never argue with them. A "provocateur" is anyone who knocks you off your very narrow-gauge rails for a moment, and the response is mindless fury. Destroy the invader.
Look around. Your "majority dialogue" is now down to six people, and two of them are the same person. Robert may well succeed in building a stronger shed wall, but the isolation will all be on the inside.