I think you miss the point a bit. The guidelines here are not unlike Gurdjieff's movements: formalism disguised as a practice of enlightenment. If your comment included something like "Lorem Ipsum's maxim from the 16th century was an example of this method being rhetorical and counter-productive", you would not have been taken to task because it would appear intellectual, even if it's nonsense.
The HN guidelines are very reasonable and they have created one of the least unpleasant discussion boards on the entire internet (and I mean, historically).
The particular guideline that dang brought up makes a lot of sense. I don't understand why he applied it in this case, but as a guideline, it's sound and solid.
This is a bit like saying that Big Brother created the ultimate utopia, all they had to do was take away individualism and impose guidelines. I agree that it's quite effective, but still doesn't root out that thorn called humanity. The harsh but necessary enforcement efforts are undertaken out of view, leading one to believe that guidelines are responsible for the present social reform; but only so much as the Newspeak dictionary was for Ingsoc.
I'd say it starts with the content. Some content is clearly going to cause conflict, and you've got stuff in place to catch some of it. More severe curating of content will help reduce this further.
Then there's the actual human interaction. We suck at communicating; adding tools to improve communication would help the discussions stay calmer.
Finally, there's the in-group mentality where people who perceive themselves as the same will act nicer to each other and perceive threats less often. By increasing the ways people can relate to each other, their empathy toward each other increases, communication becomes more friendly, and people try to work together more often.
Big Brother's approach was to attack all three of these areas rather than just create laws and police. It seems that utopian societies are a bit like gardens; if you want them to look really pretty, you'll have to do a lot of pruning.
