It seems like we're just scrapping suspect tests altogether here because one went badly... Some of these suggestions were things other people have said, but here are a few improvements I think would really help if we did go back to suspect testing.
1. Transparency in votes. I know they're all revealed in the voting thread now (although it's not shown which were originally deleted, but at this point it doesn't matter). The
explanation given in the voting thread is that it avoids public shaming, but honestly I have never heard of that happening to anyone because of a suspect vote. If you want to ban something and potentially change a tier, you should be confident enough about your opinion that you don't believe anyone will be able to ridicule it. If people are getting mistreated due to their votes, we have rules so the mods can deal with them also. Another option, if someone doesn't want their paragraph shown, allow them to write a little note in their vote saying to edit it out when the votes go public. Whatever, there are a ton of options to deal with this one.
Another idea is to release all the votes with names censored, which performs the same task without having any chance of "public shaming"
2. The mods reviewing the paragraphs should have opposite biases, if they have any. Honestly this should be common sense. Even if the mods have the best intentions, the biases can definitely affect those posts that are "on the line" without them realizing it. Or possibly disqualifying paragraphs because they disagree with the argument, even when it's not flawed.
Pro-Ban mods should only look at Pro-Ban votes, and vice versa. Like you said, this is just common sense.
3. Supermajority (60 or 67%) required to ban. This is the tier that bans as little as possible, we should be confident as a community that we want something banned if we are to ban it.
I don't know whose idea it was to not require a supermajority in the first place, but whoever it was wasn't being very smart. I pointed this out on the suspect thread and got my post deleted because I wasn't pro-ban (obvious bias in good posts that got deleted which were anti-ban and shitposts that were pro-ban that were kept)
4. Guidelines for paragraphs posted before the vote, since clearly
they do exist. There was
a post at the end of page 1 that probably put this better than I can. I just don't think the mods should have a right to reject someone's paragraph when they refuse to tell them what they even want until it's too late, and we can't go back and correct votes either. Also, it's kind of unclear, even now, about what the mods do with paragraphs that have some good arguments and some flawed arguments.
This was my whole issue with people having the right to reject a vote. Your criteria for a counted vote have to be constant, if it is human-controlled it will be objective basiacally every time.
5. Our real goal here is to make sure everyone enjoys the game as much as possible, even bad players, they're people too, we were all one at some point. There are a lot of people in this thread that will disagree with me here, but imo if a bad player wants to play 400 games to make reqs, go ahead and let them. It's clear they really care about the tier to spend that kind of time and dedication. They're active, and they're the on the ladder the most to enjoy their decision on the tier, if they have any effect on it.
Who says that only "intelligent players" should decide on a tier? Why shouldn't it be the most "dedicated" players instead? This just isn't something that is well treated in the entire smogon community, and I am unwilling to try to touch on this in a community of "intelligent players" rather than "dedicated players".