Please provide any relevant context for the context of your posts. The country you live in, culture you are part of...
I think there used to be an optional field for Location in the user profiles. I don't know why but I think it was specifically removed at one point. I kinda liked being able to get a sense of where someone was from. It also helped with understanding the source of the occasional language issue that popped up. But I'm not entirely sure whether exposing such details would be beneficial in dealing with controversial topics. While it might help someone with a mind to try and understand someone's opposing point of view, someone with a point of view that is entrenched within them may just end up thinking or posting, "Oh you're [X] so you're part of the problem and you're never going to convince me otherwise." Not having that information front and center takes that element off the table, at least for a little while.
Demanding citations to back up arguments was something that was positively embraced by quite a number of people in the Lounge for some time. I think citation demands in the Lounge have actually declined over the past couple years, I suspect actually due to an overall decrease in controversial topics. And it seems to me that the decrease in controversial topics in the Lounge is actually due more to users thinking, "This is a game development site, why would I discuss that topic here?" rather than due to actions on the part of moderators. So I wonder if part of the issue is that we're all out of practice and if a potential solution is a larger number of users (non-mods) adopting stricter standards of debate.
Also, I just want to say that this has been a pretty awesome discussion and it's really cool to see a community trying to sort out a set of workable guidelines rather than go for the easy blanket ban. These kind of discussions are one of the things that I love about this site.