I forgot two things, which can actually be fixed. Now hear me out, I'll explain them in this post.
Not that I think the mods can do much about this. Because I forgot to mention that absolute minimum moderation is key to Holla Forums.
What made Holla Forums good before was the simple rules, ZOMG NONE!!1 However in order for this to work, the mods had to exercise their power to delete and ban whatever they want very conservatively. It's funny when they'd ban some annoying faggot, but only because it didn't happen often. Otherwise, they should only be deleting outright illegal content. They also shouldn't be using their identities while conversing with the community very much. Leave it to itself and act as invisibly as possible on the rare occasions you do have to act.
Honestly, the problem is with the community. And the way the mods can help this is moreso with their actions as regular posters, rather than their actions as mods.
No, it would not. Not if it's good enough. They used to be terrified of Holla Forums. Holla Forums was a place spoken of in dark whispers only in other places of the internet that were already seen as bad. And that's the reputation it needs to be any good.
Newfag is largely a state of mind. Used to be when you showed up on Holla Forums you had to lurk for an extended period of time before posting. Not only because there were some things like noko that you wouldn't know immediately, but because everyone else would violently tell you to LURK MOAR. Everyone needs to learn to LURK MOAR.
The catalog also doesn't help, because it makes it too accessible to newfags. Low accessibility means that only people who belong here, who are very enticed by the stuff they already see, are going to stick around and learn how to use the site. The normalfags don't bother with this, and those who are left are more likely to be the type of posters who make the site better.
Frankly, by the same token, even the captcha makes things worse. Not because of collecting your info or some shit, but because it actually did help with botspam so much, and spam also kept newfags away. You had to wade through an ocean of piss, but when you found a real thread, it was more likely to actually be good. Of course, I can understand why that level of botspam would make it actually hard to keep the site up, and removing captcha would make it hard to operate the site at all.