Value, respect, and strive for diversity in editors

Yes, I have also seen many very serious cases of scaring away promising new users. That's probably one of the most important things we must become less tolerant about.

what process would you use to deal with the persistently disruptive editor? what process to encourage new users, and encourage editors to encourage? (i kinda hate to devolving to process, but it's the language of rules for rules lovers; clearly an ethos is not persuasive for all)

We just make recommendations, we don't do the detailed implementation part which is left to each Wikipedia.

Inter-personals issues is one reason why many editors leave the project as mentioned in the Former Contributors Survey Results.

Personally i try to limit use of templates when communicating with a new editors and verbose more in prose in user talk pages.