What you're not promised is the ability to win any given debate between yourself and other editors. What would you expect? How could the project possibly work otherwise?
Should we not be more concerned about blocking those who are clearly in the wrong here?
I don't know what "clearly in the wrong" means. Cross and I don't share a POV; from the little I know about him (exclusively: this article) I find his politics noxious. But I would be extremely disturbed if my opinion about his politics somehow controlled Wikipedia.
I'm not suggesting anyone base the block on their opinion of his politics, but of his behaviour on Wikipedia. There's clearly a conflict of interest when someone who is openly hostile toward someone else and taunts them on Twitter, then goes and makes the kind of edits he's making to their Wikipedia page.
There's of course a bigger issue of how Wikipedia deals with this problem more broadly. But the fact that they're unwilling to act on a single editor whose actions have been exposed doesn't inspire much confidence.
Arguably that works well, but it's almost meaningless to call it a wiki.
"if you make an edit which is good-faith reverted, do not simply reinstate your edit – leave the status quo up" ... "propose your reverted change on the article's talk page or pursue other dispute resolution alternatives." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reverting
I am not saying the policy is unreasonable, but it combined with the interface does discourage people.
As to an improvement, if Wikipedia sees the same edit applied twice it could detect this and walk someone through the policy.
You're essentially refuting yourself by making the same claim again, and yet still without offering a single example of something you are claiming is rampant. If there are "plenty" of examples, it should be easy to link a few.
I'm skeptical, because I've made many small, always anonymous edits over the years, mostly correcting spelling mistakes and bad grammar. Most of these edits were even made from dynamic IPs - and yet none of them were reverted.
But, feel free to dig through the reverts they are really common and not just for regional variations in spellings.
PS: I realize listing even 50 in all of Wikipedia is not nessisarily meaningful so no I am not going to waste my time tilting at windmills.
Note all the editors messing up the correct Pittsburg(h) with and without the h in various settings. Lot's of +/- 1 edit lengths.
Now, did some how instantly validate my point? No.
PS: But it does illustrate the situation something is popular enough that many people see it, complex enough that it takes a little thought for someone to notice an issue fix it in good faith and then get reverted.
Why is is harder to get Twinkle and Rollback now than it used to be, and why is their usage more closely monitored?
It's because people were rapidly reverting a lot of edits, and many of those edits were correct and should not have been reverted.
There's a bunch of discussion on ANI and village pump about this.