Your "solution" to the problem of a community-driven website is to stop making it a community-driven website and call in the administrators? Isn't that pretty much giving up?
At Hacker News the admin have been pretty up front about what they will do; edit titles, penalize stupid people as defined by the admin, etc. I think the threat of intervention does a lot even if it's turned off at the moment. I'm sure it's in the cards to keep the site as good as possible and that objective is correlated with being community driven as much as possible, but there's a trade-off there and I'd bet sometimes it goes the other way.
(Even mentioning this, though, I theorize that, in the future, there will be a sort of Godwin's law that prevents sociologists from bringing up 4chan.)