What are the largest issues plaguing XIV currently?

[Shurrikhan]

The thing is, it's not "occasional". It fills up the forum. He starts multiple threads pushing his agenda-of-the-day and bumps others. It clogs up the forum and the discussion revolves around him.

Then, ignore him?

If someone is so clearly cut and dried as to obviously be a troll in every post, we can't say we aren't knowingly complicit in allowing his disruption when we respond to him. He's either so painfully obvious as to need to be effectively banned, and we're half the problem, or he really is a mixed bag as, sure enough, hasn't broken the rules.

He's allowed the same posts per day per account as everyone else. If he, triple-account as he may be, singlehandedly has that huge an impact, it's either because people are more than willing to "be baited", forum activity is just that little (at which point we should probably ask... why do so few people see any reason to use the forums?), or this place's infrastructure (and people's usage habits) are far too channeled towards and around New Posts.

The respondents are genuine and that's where something interesting can happen

And, with your suggested censorship, there would be no such response, genuine or otherwise, all while giving all necessary excuse for the CMs to silently purge unofficial community leaders or the most trusted and informed job spokesmen and shut down threads that would otherwise be too detailed, concrete, or constructive to blame the playerbase for not properly communicating. That may seem a "slippery slope", and yet we've already seen the latter since late ARR. (Thread contains sizeable constructive value. Certain posts are removed, including from people no one remembers speaking out of line. People ask why they were removed. The thread is shut down. Yoshida then blames the community for being unclear or silent when some of the very things those threads detailed would be poor implementation are then released.)

Given how we've been treated thus far, that's therefore not a slope I want to start down except perhaps by the most tentative and explicit steps.

On the other hand, I can easily see tremendous advantage coming from improved forum features. Just think of how much good a curated thread does (where the OP comes back daily to quote in brief each of the most-liked suggestions and "big questions" so they're immediately visible from the first page). Think of how much good that does to keep discussion on track. We could have that for every lengthy thread, almost automatically.