I'm not a newbie--been here since 2007--but yes, definitely not since 2000. I'll accede to your seniority if that's how you perceived the board has always been, since you were there to see it first hand. That said, though, at least recently, i.e the past few months, we didn't really have a problem with loads of doofy polls since Joooohnshaft wandered by. If those were popping up before, they seemed to have subsided for a little while 'till he came back.
You may as well be a newbie since nothing of significance has happened here since 2007 (or even for years before that). If not for the ICVDers here right now, this place is usually pretty inactive, so I'm sure that helps in curbing the number of repetitive topics.
A few months is nothing by the way. That's like a fart. Joooohnshaft is also insignificant in the history of this forum. He doesn't even come into the equation of the general trends.
I probably was a bad moderator, yes. I was a dumb kid for one. I would say that he should stop giving mod powers to dumbass angsty teens, but some of the older folk (read: PJK) he's chosen are every bit as emotionally unstable. I was a lazy ass. I don't remember doing much with my powers. I'd rather let arguments fizzle out on their own, and The Pic was just funny. Between PJK and Jorge (and Darkmoon and Richter to a lesser extent), there was already an assload of overzealous moderation going on anyway.