I havent read evertthing, so excuse me in advance for saying something that has been said already.
I wanna touch a point that that glov mentioned about there being limited staff positions. There may be some truth in this altough I cant remmember a time when I thought to myself there are to many designers/architects before i promoted someone. If i thought someone was worth it and if that opinion was shared i would go ahead with promoting said individual.
Now about worldedit. There are two reasons why I rather keep worldedit available to a limit group. One being I used to vet people who where going to have access to worldedit a whole lot more then I did artist. Worldedit is a powerfull tool that can be dangerous in untrained hands. If someone where to abuse it they can do serious harm to the server. Harm that outweights the benefits.
Now ofcourse we can apply the same vetting we do with staff albeit would take allot of extra work. But that still leaves out the training part.
Right now a new designer gets a buddy assigned that teaches him both world edit and voxel. So far this seems to work well. This could potentially work for artist to. But then we are again looking at extra work on top of the vetting proces.
Artist rank is designed to give talented people the ability to build. And as simple as that sounds is exactly as simple I would like to leave it. The only thing I personally would consider is allowing artist voxel light. Small maximum brush size and limited brush choice. Easy to teach and simple to manage just how I like it.
So that is my 2 cents.
tldr: I am against giving artist we because it involves to much extra work. But I would consider giving them voxel light.
PS: typed on phone forgive my grammar and spelling etc.
I totally agree that big damage can be caused by world edit, but as we discussed above, that damage can be limited and repaired by rolling back areas and limiting the areas (for example only in dol amroth or in a certain area that can be set by a designer) the player can world edit in.
Griefing barely happens by artists now, so I don't see any reason why they would suddenly start doing it now more than they used to. I think the biggest problem would be by far that some artists are in-experienced with the tool and could mess up by that. For that the vetting systme could work out, I would happily help some people to learn a bit more about world edit.
I see that the application progress takes pretty long for most commoners to get artist. rey for example has been commoner for 1 and a half month before he got artist. He showed activity and talent, so he got promoted, but isn't showing interest in this project for a month being on almost daily enough? And reycraft got promoted fairly quickly, Superlolster has been commoner for 5 months and still comes on and updates her application. They both are just an example of every commoner appyling for artist at the moment.
There may apply people that only do it for world edit and plan to grief, but I don't imagin that would happen very often. Since they would have to obtain commoner, build up a portfolio by participating in jobs and themed builds, show activity, become an actual good builder... the whole progress easily takes a month or two of almost daily activity. That's just too much work for a random troll.
EDIT:
Ontop of that, look at the freebuild, how much griefing has happend there in the last year it's been there? And any commoner can build there. Getting commoner is allready so much work for trollers, not worth it and shows who's truely interested in the server allready.