One thought:

You make the point that you don't want to "defang" the game by making stuff easier, and that that's part of the challenge, and that people should respect that by not posting walk-throughs or blatantely sharing information that the staff intends for players to gain through exploration.

That's all fine and dandy. However, we don't live in an ideal world, and it should be expected that not every player will act in the way he "should". The question, then, is whether the "ideal" system can function in an imperfect world.

Take the case of puzzles. Puzzles are meant to be challenging, and the value of their rewards is set accordingly. But if everybody knows the shortcut to completing a puzzle it ceases to be challenging, and the reward then becomes disparately valuable for the effort required.

Wands is another one. It's often stated that, when a player finds a wand, if he doesn't share that wand's location with others, then it's more likely to be there when he needs it. All true. However, it only takes one player discovering the same wand and circulating its location to ruin the supply for the "non-sharing" guy.

Problem is, I don't see any solution. I would call the current strategy "containment". That is to say, try to enforce rules, hand out in-game punishments, etc. in an attempt to create the ideal environment. But this is an imperfect solution at best, since it's impossible to achieve 100% enforcement. Another solution (which also has its problems) would be to remove "exploration-based" items that are disproportionately influential on a particular class's (or set of classes') success. Wands for mages, poison/trap ingredients for relevant thieves, etc.

Basically, this view would make it so the rewards of exploration are much less than they currently are, so it wouldn't really matter (game-play wise) whether the information were shared. Preps in general (other than stuff like flight) would have to be toned way down, so that a "fully prepped" character would enjoy a much smaller advantage over a non-prepped character than they currently do today.

Note: I'm not saying I support this kind of change, just thinking out loud.