Despite these facts, this censorship power is too severe, and too seductive, to leave in the hands of one person, or even the four that seem to have been involved at one time. That is centralization of that censorship power, and is the opposite of decentralized censorship resistance, no matter the quality of the moral fiber of the individual bearing that weight alone. The moral hazard, as I mention above, is simply too onerous a burden to bear.
But it's not just one person involved. I can go make my own list, develop an API, and put people on there I don't like. It's up to others to either use it if they find it useful, or discard it if they see no value.
It may be one person making the list, but it's up to others running services to decide whether or not to use it, which creates accountability. As soon as it is perceived to be using for abuse, the front ends would stop using it, or maybe only grab a few names from there for their own list. It is up to the list creator to make an honest list which is valuable to the community, or else all their effort can be ignored overnight.
You are a prince among men, and I and the vast majority of ordinary meat puppets are incapable of developing an API.
While things have indeed been changed (in ways I have not yet given time to understand) if the choice is between eliminating massive onslaughts of spam and a few annoying people, or suffering that devastating spam, front ends have had little practical choice.
Might as well ask me to build a moon rocket and see the Apollo astronaut's tracks on the Moon for myself to prove the Moon landing wasn't faked.
My concern has been addressed by folks with the skills and means to address it, and other than @joe.public no longer being totally censored, I have not yet ascertained how, and whether or not what has been done exceeds my hopes, meets them, or yet leaves me concerned the community remains vulnerable to being selectively silenced without meaningful recourse. I have learned a great deal from broaching this issue with @themarkymark, and at least know now I owe him both an apology for my inaccurate statements (partly undertaken already), and thanks for enabling me to better understand, as well as doing Yoeman's duty to prevent spam from causing every user on the network to suffer.
I shall have to wrap my head around new information, and new understanding, before I can determine how to proceed. One thing I can promise is that I won't be developing an API myself, because my programming skills are limited to one course in BASIC I took in 1980 that is almost a complete blank, and formerly (prior to CSS) being able to write HTML in notepad and create websites on the fly.
I don't have the skills, and neither do most people.