I've discovered that admins these days do much more "shoot on sight" against disruptive user accounts. I've seen my socks blocked for one or two edits without warning.

Without knowing any of the details, I can only suggest that they may be operating under WP:RBI.

Oh come on, the question is when do you "B" in RBI.

The days of four level vandalism warnings seem way past. You can't get away with anything anymore.

And you expected them to become "more forgiving" with time?.......

The beginning of the end. Soon, all new accounts will be blocked in this manner,
and that will be the death sentence for the thing. As I predicted before, it will become a
private playground, editable by no one except the most evil patrollers and gnomes.
Who will be the only remaining users allowed to edit articles.

And of course, they don't give a rat-shit about the articles, they only care about
abusing people. The articles will become a "honeypot" to attract more victims.
The remaining gnomes will grind the articles into crap. And the unwashed who
used Wikipedia will sit there and go "what happened to this? Golly!"

Hopefully, someone with more scruples than King Jimbo The Questionable will start
a new encyclopedia, and steal the good articles from the old one. So much for
Creative Commons licensing.

Well they could turn it around, and mess with the rules a bit. Lets say they had a 'thanks' button which people could click when some one was helpful. Configure the css so that appeared along side signatures. Anyone that got say 500 thanks votes, could trade them in for the admin bit bypassing RFA.

In next to no time you'd have a whole bunch running about the site working on getting thanks points.

In next to no time, you'd have legions of socks "farming" "thanks" for bonus points...

You say that as if it would be a bad thing.

But hey only count 1 thanks per account->account in a calendar month.

The vandal-suppression folks are tired, and losing patience. The system is cracking.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

--fromThe Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

if only they'd be so quick to deal with established problem users.
We need more of this quick and done blocks rather than the constant hand holding and coddling of users who clearly will never get it.