The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
After 13 years of talking about RfA, we finally have WP:RFA2015: three RfCs, including this one, that find consensus on some significant changes ... superconsensus, even. Maybe that's a sign that we're getting better at making and debating proposals about RfA. (Or maybe not.) These RfCs are making me look forward to future ones ... but not too soon, I hope, because if we change too much all at once, we won't know which changes worked and which ones didn't.
There's a lot of great stuff in these three RfCs, and I encourage everyone to read as much as you have time for. Probably the big eye-opener for me was the vehement opposition to giving admins any special responsibility for clerking ... if that sentiment has been with us all along at RfA, that admins can't be trusted to deal with perceived problems at RfA because that would give admins too much say in who gets to be an admin, then that explains a lot about why RfA problems have been so difficult to deal with over the years.
I think the voters here are saying that there are some simple jobs at RFA that anyone acting in good faith is permitted to do; that, for those jobs that people have been doing all along that have proved to be uncontroversial, there's no reason to make restrictions on who can do the jobs; and, that it would be a terrible mistake to create a new bureaucracy of any kind devoted to jobs like these.
As most of you know (and I'm counting at least 4 ways that voters here could or should have known), in the first RfC in this series, a "clear consensus" (probably a superconsensus) was found that something needs to be done about hostility toward candidates during RfAs. (Of course, RfA can be even more hostile to voters than to candidates sometimes, but that's not the question of the moment.) Maybe I'm missing something, but can anyone here point to any comment made in any of these RfCs that suggests an approach to the hostility problem that might be relevant to this RfC, other than what some are calling "clerking"? (Part of the problem, of course, is that the term hasn't been defined, and it's clear that different people mean different things by it.) On the other hand, deep skepticism about clerking is apparent in this RfC. Personally, I buy many of the anti-clerking arguments here, and even if I didn't, I'd be forced to say that the anti-clerking vote has completely won the day in this RfC ... assuming that you define clerks as some group (other than crats) who are in charge of challenging or redacting hostile comments in RfAs. But the voters here don't seem to have a problem with the idea of letting crats do something similar. Scroll down to the section on letting Bureaucrats "clerk": only five people are opposing, and I can't assign much weight to those five arguments. (I'll be happy to discuss this on the talk page if necessary, but what I think on this point isn't important; it will be up to the crats to figure out what they can and can't do, and up to future RfC voters to figure out whether the crats are dealing effectively with the hostility problem.) Pulling all this together: I find a lot of support for and no significant opposition to the idea of allowing crats to deal with the "hostility" problem identified in the first RfC. And they have sole responsibility for the job, at least according to this RfC, because I'm finding overwhelming opposition to the idea of letting anyone other than crats act as clerks to deal with that particular problem (although anyone is welcome to do a few routine clean-up tasks). A few voters suggested that it's not a good idea to allow one person to both "clerk" (whatever that means) an RfA and close it ... but of course, we have lots of crats, and they can probably figure out how to divide up duties.
And finally ... I could be completely wrong. The way most RfC voters approach the job of writing a rationale is: they try to say the thing that hasn't been said yet that needs to be said. What they don't tell the poor closer is which positions they agree with and which they disagree with, which makes assessing support for various positions very difficult. If I goofed, tell me.