You are neither paranoid nor missing to explain yourself.

The problem with Tor is that it is getting abused by botnets and spambots, so the IPs are getting blacklisted. We are not deliberately blocking Tor, it is just a few exit-nodes.

So we have a silly problem at hand, people want us to reduce spamposts and ddos like registrations sprees but at the same time not have captcha active and no blacklist in place. Captcha is only active for registration and first 5 posts, akismet filtering is only there for the first 2 posts. The IP filtering is permanent and while we lift any blacklisting of home IPs on request we would be stupid to do that for high-bandwidth Tor exit-nodes (it is only a few nodes that are blacklisted actually).

So finding a solution that fits everyone is actually not that easy, leave alone the ddos attacks we could ignore the spam and registration problem at hand, have a team of 100 active spam-moderators (we have 11 where only 5 are active) that do a good job in housekeeping all day - now we got our public port shutdown by our provider once and you do not want that to happen ever, so how do we block attacks that can have an impact on our provider? With a firewall, a decent blacklist and a sane configuration of those two.

If you want me to disable captcha and akismet (the google services), I can do that for a couple of days, we can also disable the blacklist. What you do not see, is what happens behind the curtains. Without these automatic filter solutions, it becomes a dayjob to maintain. While I am currently looking for new opportunities (I'd take 45k€ annually), this is voluntary work we do. And it is not easy to keep this level of spam without some downside.