Reverts

Exactly. They couch their argument in wikipedia-specific lingo. Another particularly insidious manuever is to suggest that you are violating policies for which you may be blocked.

Wikipedia blocks are quite reasonably specific and time-delimited, nevertheless they have a chilling and inhibitory effect, no one wants them,and if one has never gone through a block or an Arb, it can be very put offish.

I would describe it as "hostile". The revert method is the path of least resistance, and it is the most likely to be perceived like it's a bully stomping on your sand castle.

Agreed. No one likes seeing their work reverted.

But it's also one of the central features of the Wiki system. So we're not going to get rid of reverts.

The next best thing would be to help new users understand why things are reverted. (One idea: for new users, have the revert edit summary CC'd to their user talk page.) Another helpful strategy would be to steer new users away from high-conflict pages that are more likely to be reverted, and push them towards improving articles where novices are likely to be most helpful.