That statement is almost entirely wrong, from top to bottom.  No, from a policy standpoint, it is not worse except for biographies of living persons; countries are not living people, cannot be libelled, hence the invention of the  template, which you chose not to use (hence it being destructive).  I've added references for a handful of select nations because they are the ones that joined after independence.  Almost all the rest joined at independence, so it is academic to show their join date.  I have added information above and beyond what is on the Commonwealth Secretariat's site because said site is not a repository for all the information in the world on the Commonweath; are we saving space s that the inane 'continent' field can be included?  The last point, that the opinion of a single user constitutes a consensus, is a bizarre misinterpretation of Wikipedia policy - yet again.

I will also, finally, suggest that you (a) make better use of edit summaries, rather than claiming that deletion of what took me a long time to create in the first place is 'cleaning up'; and (b) read my edit summary before inferring that I intended to hurt your poor feelings - 'destructive' does not mean 'evil', but that some information has been lost, which was NOT conveyed in your obfuscatory edit summary.