This decision seems entirely reasonable to me, and I think it will likely lead to a slightly easier moderation process for you long-term, but I am slightly discomfited by the decision-making process displayed here. Obviously, it's good for a site's staff to be responsive to its userbase, but it took you seven months to write the original rules, and must have known that the provision in question would be controversial. I'm having trouble understanding the process that leads to the creation of such a rule, followed by its reversal after a few hours of angry comments. I'm extremely curious what you expected the response to be, how this differed from that, and how that discrepancy led to such a quick reversal after spending so long writing the original rule.
When this came up seven months ago, I commented that if you solicited feedback on controversial topics like this in the future, it would be advisable to offer a low-effort, anonymous commenting method like a poll or form, and @jkap wrote, "Agreed that this is absolutely also something we fucked up, and you can rest assured we won't be making that mistake again." However, you still seem to have only solicited feedback via public comments and email. Given that, it's unclear to me how you determined that "it's clear most [users] wanted this to be changed." While, again, I think that this is a reasonable change, I don't think there's any way you can tell what most users think about it from those venues over that time span. Obviously, there is a portion of the userbase which feels extremely strongly about the issue, but the comments and emails immediately following an announcement like that are obviously not going to be a remotely representative sample. I can't know what your emails looked like (though I can guess) but I'm sure that comment section would have been extremely intimidating to anyone who wanted to speak up in support of the rule.
Ultimately, I just don't want the rules of this site to be determined by whoever can yell at staff the most. While, once again, I think this particular change is reasonable, it's very easy for me to imagine a world in which a segment of the userbase gets up in arms about any number of controversial topics or paraphilias being allowed here, @staff makes a post addressing it, and those comments being filled almost exclusively by people who are upset that it's allowed. When that happens, how will staff determine what the majority of the userbase actually wants (if that is indeed the threshold), and when it is necessary to change the rules accordingly?
Edit in response to the commenter who blocked me immediately after replying: Apparently, repeating it three times in this post wasn't enough, so I will be explicit. I do not have strong feelings about this particular rule, and would happily continue using the site either way. It would have been fine with me if "cub" content had been banned from the beginning. My concerns are entirely to do with the process that led to this rule being adopted in the first place, and then immediately reversed upon angry feedback, particularly without making any changes to the way that feedback is collected.
If it is necessary to disclaim, I find pornography depicting fictional underage characters (human or otherwise) personally repellent and upsetting, and I do not ever want to see it. However, I also don't consider it my business what fictional content others create, share, or consume. There are other types of content I consume that some people consider upsetting and even immoral, but which the rules of this site currently allow. I do not want to log on in the future to find that staff made a big post about how that kind of content is allowed, and then changed their mind and banned it after getting some angry comments and emails.
Hopefully that comment will serve to demonstrate my point about these comment sections not being representative samples, since even a comment like this of the rule change will result in that kind of attack.
