:::Oh, I know VK was no angel; I was there when the blue touchpaper was lit and I was there when the fireworks finally burned out. He was argumentative, arrogant, prone to flare-ups and wouldn't let go on an issue once he had his ire up. However, he was also subject to a relentless campaign of harassment for years by people who should know better, and there was a small group of the same few admins who had a dislike for him and would watch his contributions for a pretext to block him. He had much the same role in 2007 as Giano had in 2008, or Malleus in 2009. However (again, like Malleus and Giano), as you say, when he wasn't involved in his scorpions-in-a-bottle routine with KB and RP - which was most of the time - he was helpful, productive, hardworking and willing to get stuck into the boring minutiae which far too many of the Grand Actors of Wikipedia think is beneath them. There's a qualitative difference between a dog which is repeatedly poked with a stick and eventually bites its pokers, and a rabid dog who attacks people at random, even if the net result of both is "people get bitten and the dog gets shot".

(In any case, length of block log is generally an awful measure of "problematicness". A truly problematic user generally only has one entry in their block log.) – scent