I like the way you dismissively quote “the community” like stashdb isn’t a commmunity-driven database and “the community” is an unfair response to your complaints.
First, in the early days of stashdb everyone recognized that JAV would have to be an exception to fit in the database, and it was left to “the community” how best to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Second, there’s a reason they’re called “guidelines” and not “rules” (like you call them multiple times in your post). They were written to follow “how it’s always been done” at the time they were written, not to change anything. Straight from the guy who wrote the guidelines:
Exceptions exist. The guidelines don’t cover everything. They were never meant for someone who has no interest in JAV (apart from asserting themselves as a rules lawyer) to come along years later and say “it turns out the community is wrong!”
Note how everyone other than you is happy to leave it to the “jav people” because they’re the ones actually collecting and matching the data? And again, you contradict yourself by accepting the unwritten exception for JAV titles and descriptions while responding to everything else with “if it’s not written down it’s against the rules.” Guess where the “Community” Scrapers come from?
JAV movies on stashdb are recognized as requiring exceptions due to the language and full-movie exemption. Move on.
Dates
You asked three times, got the same answer every time, ignored those answers by demanding a written guideline, harassed people in the queue until they did things your way, and then point at the inconsistency you created to say “See! It’s not consistent!”
by convention DVD release date is the actual release date
I feel like that’s pretty common tbh. The DVD release date is often cited as the official date even with respect to the VOD release
For JAV the canonical release date has been the DVD release, probably since the industry is DVD-centric. Note most of their studio websites use the DVD release date even when they link to both, we use the DVD ID as the title and studio code, the only cover is a DVD sleeve.."
It’s easy for this to be consistent because every other JAV metadata source with combined entries (like stashdb) does the same thing, and the only r18 links that typically return the DVD ID are the physical or VOD-only entries (you accept data returned by Community Scrapers, right?). Unless you’re about to argue that we should be using the FANZA content ID as the studio code.
r18 as primary source
r18 is the only piracy-free source for JAV metadata in english. It’s an accurate scrape of the former R18 and Fanza. It’s the only source for a consistent machine translation of JAV titles, saving everyone from getting something completely different by translating on their own. Banning it as a primary source would only result in submitters using it and lying about it. I’m sure all the english-only JAV collectors are happy with it. And telling people to just put the content ID at the end of all those links is wrong because all those storefronts use different content IDs.
Other inconsistencies
Studio links: javlibrary, javdatabase, javdb, javguru, etc. shouldn’t be added as a studio link, but a lot edits with added unsourced performers are probably getting info from those. It should be alright to mention in the comments.
r18 VOD-only covers: These shouldn’t be used as a cover if a proper DVD cover exists. FANZA is the only storefront that uses them on the movie page (as in, it’s the first item in the gallery in front of the proper DVD cover), and even then they still use the DVD cover in results pages. It’s usually an expanded version of the back of the DVD, which doesn’t have the title on it. Also JAV collectors want the cover that matches 99% of their other releases.
Side note: Links would make your post more readable than a wall of unformatted text.