I agree. As a Wikipedia admin since 2004, I'm upset by the increasing hesitance of long-term editors to allow anonymous IPs to explore and edit. One wonders if they can even remember when they were a green anonymous IP editor, adding content or fixing typos, before being wholly sucked into the wiki-world.

I too wish that Jimbo were more stubborn in sticking to his principles of openness. But openness seems to be giving way to consensus. And the admins on IRC seem to have his ear on vandal fighting.

However, if flagged revisions are meant only to replace protected and semi-protected article status, then I think it's a good move. Because it allows people to edit and hash things out, even if the changes aren't immediately shown to the public. This is better than simply locking all users out. One hopes that we can curb the proliferation of flagged revisions, but I'm not sure one will be able to stop its expansion to nearly everything in Category:Living people.