I'll have a think about this.  Some of it amounts to, hmm, not a basic civility, but an outright encouragement.  I'd like to take that up.  Sometimes, however, a citation formatting decline is due to fundamental errors.  I think a Comments with a lapse is better for the first type.  I'm still sticking with Decline for the second type.
A third case is 2c errors concealing 1c errors.  Often real 1c checking can't begin without appropriate citations.  Perhaps this is a subset of the second kind of problem, where citation formatting consistency causes a decline.
Jargon is harder.  Citations are a jargon driven field.  This is mostly where I'll be thinking about it.
In terms of actual line-by-line referencing, the problem is that when I want to say Burdett2009Hateful for Burdett, Example. "My hateful dreams about ducks." In A Compendium of Duck Hatred. Ed. Janice Fowlloather (London: Avianloathe Press, 2009): 209-249. Often the nominator turns up with "Janice Fowlloather (2009). A Compendium of Duck Hatred. Avian." or some other partial attempt made worse through use of the citation templates without understanding the basic concept behind citation for verification.  If I quote it as fn27, it breaks rapidly, if I quote it as Fowlloather2009Compendium, it should actually change.
In paying off verbosity against wordlimits, I suppose I need to shift back towards verbosity, but "This is an Encyclopedia article you're quoting, that makes it a tertiary source, the only really reliable tertiary sources are ones aimed at an academic public, written by academics. The way we determine this is usually are do the articles contain a specific by-line by an academic specialist in the field acting as an author of that specific article you quote.  Are the articles "signed".  Your citation doesn't indicate this is an academic work, by academics, signed by academics; it is an unsigned tertiary source.  Please provide a full citation so we can judge it." 
Let me keep thinking.