Very reasonable question, i know. I asked myself the same question when i closed the thread finally.
We moderators are'nt robots and can't read any new thread immediately. And even if we do, then there is still a fine line between censorship and moderation. We have (and want) to be very careful in such situations and try to take every post with a pinch of salt. Such situations are not just a matter of good or bad. There is no pure "right or wrong" and our posting guidelines are, well, just guidelines that leave enough scope in both directions. The lounge, where "friendly banter and discussions unrelated to e-books" takes place, is naturally a especially difficult section in this regard.
If you really want take such a closing message seriously then please consider too what happened before such a message was posted. We have a "tactic" which was called "informal policy of eternal optimism" recently.
Almost all of our actions are discussed in the moderators suite first and closing a thread is one of the last options. Before closing a thread we usually send private messages to certain members regarding our concerns and/or post warning comments ("Play nice messages"). If nothing helps then we have to close such threads.
MobileRead is our all baby and we have to take care of it together, right? I like the idea of trusting any MobileRead member doing the right thing in such situations (discussions). Sometimes this doesn't work unfortunately. That's life and then one of us moderators has to step in. And yes, even moderators can be wrong (at least i know that i'm not perfect) but we are learning every day and we try to do the right things.