All of your suggestions sound quite reasonable, but they also demand cpu cycles and human patience ("Where's my node? Why isn't it showing up?") Many of the algorithm changes you mention have been discussed in the past, and the current scheme appears to be somewhere between "most desirable" and "least objectionable".

Frankly, I don't think the dups are that big of a deal. If it gets by the approval/moderation process, then we have janitors as a second line of defense. I can't remember it being necessary very often, but gods can intervene too.

...

Hmmm. I've noticed that every few weeks or so, the requests in Perl Monks Discussion swing from "make it faster" to "make it more functional", then back again.

Remember when you had to go to your PHB and tell him that new feature won't fit in the existing application, that it takes more than just coding to make it work, that you only had so many resources to dedicate to this project? Well, it's sort of like that. Adding more features to prevent dupes sounds great, but it needs somebody to write it, someone else to test and apply it, somebody to write a node saying it's changed, and someone else to hang out in the CB saying "yes, we know" ;-), all on a live system. Even if we doubled all the monk salaries, I don't think they could go any faster.

Update
That wisecrack about "monk salaries" is a joke, OK?

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