Okay, now that I've looked around a bit and actually thought things through, I think I can see the reason the whole drama-bomb happened:
1. The new color scheme appeared.
2. Some people got mad at the new color-scheme.
3. The response from the people who were having fun was universally to brush off this anger and make jokes at the people who were angry.
4. The people who were mad got more mad.
Now, I'm not going to say the knee-jerk RAEG over the new color scheme was justified (particularly my own; overreactions have always been a problem for me). I'm also not going to say that anyone should have seen this coming before the fact, since 20-20 hindsight is 20-20, and if you worried about unadulterated fury in response to every little thing, you'd never get anything done.
But 4 happening as a result of 3 seems kind of obvious to me (though this is still hindsight). Continuing to brush them off as "communist pig-dogs", or that deal-with-it image ... well, I know that it was in jest, and nobody was actually serious about it. The thing is, the angry people were serious, and it therefore gave them the impression that they were being trivialized, that the other people (including the people who ran the forum!) didn't actually care how they felt. Worse were the people who outright insulted them, calling them and their anger "stupid." And, like all people on the internet, the angry people responded by taking it personally. The fun, to them, was being had at their expense. Was this true? Was their increased anger "justified"? Of course not, but it was still there. And so we started to have a feedback loop.
The point I'm trying to make here is: once you have this anger out there, you need to actually take it seriously and deal with it. Joking about peoples' anger to their faces makes it worse. The number-one priority should have been defusing the anger, because it automatically leads to more anger regardless of whose "fault" it is or how justified you think their anger is.
Lenin, I think, understood this. Stalin did, too, after his own fashion. It remains to be seen whether the same can be said of others who would follow in their footsteps.
