Yes, there was a problem with vote solicitation, and we know how strongly many users feel about this. But the community support for Pinboard was unmistakeable, so there's a tradeoff here either way. In this case, the margin of that community support was so high that I think it has to win.
There are very few community management problems Wikipedia hasn't had to tackle, and, unsurprisingly, this is one of the earliest ones:
I've also been e-mailed by strangers asking me to vote for their Show HNs on the /new page, and in one case was even approached "As an influencer [hah!], would you mind spreading buzz around our XYZ Startup that we'll be posting to Hacker News shortly." Usually I just respond to these with "You know there's a voting ring detector, right?", but it's not really clear what is or isn't acceptable from a HN community moderator's perspective.
HN doesn't have a lot of resources to combat abuse (notice how much abuse prevention is just 'dang --- who runs all of HN --- personally writing corrective notices [they're not even the same notices! Dan, get a shortcut completer!]).
I think a pretty big part of their strategy is to wait for serial abusers to do something stupid and then penalize their accounts. It's an arms race. If they list all the things you can do to get a submission penalized, they're making it harder to catch serious abusers.
I do use a shortcut completer—personally recommended by tptacek as it turns out—for some things, but more on the email side.
There's a design point here too. After two years, these comments have shown themselves to be partly formulaic and the sort of thing that could benefit from software support. I'd like that software support to be something available to users, not just moderators. If there were a way for users to convey to each other that a comment could be edited to better follow the guidelines, that'd be great, because we (actually just I in this respect, since I'm the only one currently posting moderation comments) would no longer be the bottleneck. The long-term vision for HN is to make it a self-regulating system.
original poster meant that writing these posts are cathartic for you because they let you "untangle the knots" in this situation. he is referring to your (commonly believed) good-hearted nature and how it must be relieving for you to set things right.
he didn't mean that you are using these posts to let off some steam, as you have perceived it.