The problem with that approach is that people like Ken can outshout everyone else's comments, rendering the space worthless for actual discussion. You'll notice that is was in fact the readers of VFTW who asked that Ken be banned - and the reason was that he was making numerous rude comments in every thread, comments that added nothing to the discussion at hand and which everyone else got tired of having to skip over. If he'd stuck to only one comment per thread, I doubt he'd have been banned.

Persistent trolls are every bit as destructive to online communities as spammers are, and should be banned for the same reasons.