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Ultimately, a lot of the chat-speak issue comes down to effort-to-impact ratio.
Personally, I am not a fan of zero tolerance policies - as I see them as "lazy" -- removing the ability to judge something contextually in exchange for the ease of a rule to be enforced blindly.  It's no simple matter to moderate discussions that can easily degenerate into arguments and destroy civil conversation at a moment's notice.
So, each board/blog has its particular tolerances and rules of what constitutes acceptable discourse.  In an ideal world, a moderator could tell "Joe123" -- "you're getting a little over the top with the chat-speak, could you dial it down a notch?" -- and Joe would adjust his posting and everyone would move on.  Problem is -- too often Joe123's response is going to be to go, "why you hatin' on me - when Sue456 is waaaay worse?" -- which leads only to many posts about everything except what the topics at hand actually are.
I prefer MC and SSI because they are less tolerant of intolerance, (oh, the irony).  Basically, they have a kinder, gentler tone than LL or USSM, so for my purposes, the noise to signal ratio at these other sites isn't amenable to my personal needs.  But, obviously, there are lots of different flavors of audiences.
I think zero-tolerance policies are somewhat (ironically) necessary at the sites that allow more open dissent.  When you require more "reasonable" posting, you get more reasonable posters - so the gentle rebuke can be followed more readily w/o it being viewed as a personal attack, (mostly).  Springer and Oprah both have their audiences - but only one requires armed guards as a necessity.