This isn't true. Shog, Jay, and many others were hired from the community precisely because they were avid long term users who had demonstrated deep insight into the culture and organization of Stack. I would easily rate them as equal to myself if not, frankly, better at helping the Stack community govern itself.
The reality is that good Q&A takes a fair bit of discipline to get right, and that means rules and standards. This rubs some people the wrong way, but it is the ONLY way to achieve reliable, sustainable, long term quality.
If you have specific examples of where things went wrong in a question, take it to meta and discuss it so that the community can adapt and change. That is how community works, and Stack is a democracy in that sense -- anyone can provide evidence and push for change.
(warning, though, scroll down in the comments here to see an example that turned out to be an anti-example when examined closely. A lot of times people just complain when they don't like rules, and the rules don't favor their personal needs versus the needs of the community or the greater Internet)
I'm afraid that many of the people you'll find in meta are the "soup nazis" the article complains about.
Any community is a sieve. It takes effort to join and the more you get involved the more time and effort it consumes and at every step someone gives up and drops out. The meta subsite is not easy to stumble into, very few people will have any questions to ask there and very few will have a good answer to contribute so it takes a lot of effort to get there. That means that the crowd that hangs out in meta will be very different from the bulk of SO/SE.
Several meta discussions were linked by ircmaxell above and another was posted in the r/programming discussion - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/286299/closing-quest... - so let's take a look: those of questions that are expressing disagreement with how things are run (that cv-pls is a bad idea and that often questions are closed when they shouldn't) are currently at -20, -14, -24 and -13 points. But let's ignore the votes and look at the answers: the absolutely overwhelming consensus is that everything is right an nothing should be done. I'm not saying that "they" are wrong and "we" are wrong, just take note that there's zero overlap in opinions expressed here and there.
It's unrealistic to say that the community folks are a perfect replacement for you and Joel being engaged because they too are engaged. That may be so, they may be more engaged than you ever were, but that's only half the equation. They don't have the authority and power that you did. It's not their baby, they're just baby sitters. They can't make sweeping changes because they think it's a good idea. They can't easily change the featureset of the system to support something they want. They have to go through a long process of getting buy off from folks for features, and then waiting until they're implemented.
When was the last time a major feature change happened with the software? It's unrealistic to imagine that there hasn't been a need for change and that the tools that were necessary for managing the community, say, 4 years ago are precisely identical to the ones that are needed today. That implies the community hasn't changed or that the tools were somehow perfect. Both are very unlikely.
Discipline is completely beside the point here. Of course good Q&A sites need discipline, and that loops back to authority figures exercising their powers (mods, admins, etc.) And sure there are people who will complain that SO is a harsh place and they just want to have fun. But that fails to address the many very well founded criticisms of the mod community on SO that numerous people have made, especially concerning abuse of power and twisting the site toward a different vision than it launched with. Imagine a sheriff making a statement that police brutality is justified because criminals exist.
Spammers exist, and low quality questions are a menace, but that doesn't stop the problems with stack overflow from being real.
Moreover, it's all too easy to fall into the complacency trap of saying that SO still has significant value to a lot of people, is still hugely popular, etc. That doesn't indicate that SO is fine, it merely shows that it might not be too late to fix the serious systemic and endemic problems it has. If you were to look at some magical graph of the "successfulness" or "popularity" of stack overflow over time, the point where things "went wrong" would not be at the peak. It wouldn't even be at the inflection point where things went from accelerating upwards to accelerating downwards. It would be before that, when the conditions that caused the inflection point to occur were in effect.
The reality is that good Q&A takes a fair bit of discipline to get right, and that means rules and standards. This rubs some people the wrong way, but it is the ONLY way to achieve reliable, sustainable, long term quality.
If you have specific examples of where things went wrong in a question, take it to meta and discuss it so that the community can adapt and change. That is how community works, and Stack is a democracy in that sense -- anyone can provide evidence and push for change.
(warning, though, scroll down in the comments here to see an example that turned out to be an anti-example when examined closely. A lot of times people just complain when they don't like rules, and the rules don't favor their personal needs versus the needs of the community or the greater Internet)