I've been around since well before the bar-raising days and honestly, when I first signed-up for an account seven years ago it wasn't quite so unfriendly to new noders. You could put up a node with some pretty decent information culled from personal experience, maybe an anecdote, or just some random thefez-style nonsense and it would probably go pretty far. At least, it likely wouldn't be downvoted into oblivion too quickly as long as someone found it funny.
Truth be told I miss many of those write-ups even though I was one to (still) rage against the infamous McFlurry. The problem is that humor is pretty damn subjective and one person's idea of a great time is someone else's massive waste of space polluting the precious database. Then again we raised the bar so high that putting in a new write-up requires either an amazingly specific area of knowledge that hasn't been covered and can be done in sufficient depth, or a good week doing research. That is, unless you go the route of recipes (please do!) or poetry (please, please don't!) or something else that stays subjective, but can usually be thought to include more value than, as I'm told the kids like to say these days "teh lolz".
Getting specific to the issues raised by the students though I see a few crucial things.
First, they know about Wikipedia and it influences their opinions rather heavily. E2 is not viewed in light of itself, but in how it relates. We give off the idea (especially from the name) that we accept literally everything and people get upset when told that their minor contribution isn't good enough. People see old E1 one-liners still hanging around and wonder why their new placeholder (which will, probably, be that way forever) one-liner is seen as shoddy work knocked-off without a modicum of effort. They see creative writing and poetry and assume that it's just a community for writers and take it personally when people don't like their work or others don't think it even belongs. They see our factuals and think that we aren't as encyclopedic as Wikipedia and that adding a contribution is a herculean effort and compared to Wikipedia it really is.
Second, they're lazy. Sorry, no other way to put it. Is documentation a pain in the ass here? You bet it is! The last time I tried to look something up I was at a loss to find it after plenty of searching until I just fiddled in my scratch pad or decided to forget about it. At the same time it seems like a lot of the students just wanted to jump in and start writing something after reading a quick intro. Well, I don't think E2 is like that. Then again, I'm the sort of person who never does anything without thoroughly reading the instructions first. I don't even play arcade games without reading the complete directions on the cabinet and when I put together my poorly-made, Swedish crap I read the directions all the way through twice and constantly refer to them while I do it. The information needs to be more accessible, but as I said, they're comparing it to Wikipedia where, despite massive volumes of information on doing it in the right style and tone (and let's not even get into their piddly issues of whether it's important enough or if you heaven-forbid decided to add trivia or otherwise violate their strict demands to beige-up everything) they make it damn easy to just hop in, edit some typos or add a line of text and go. If we're harder to use than that they'll bitch... and I can't say I entirely blame them.
Finally, and somewhat of a related topic, is that they don't all seem to want to join a community and get to know it first. Lots of people reported reading a few nodes before starting. I can't say what everyone else did, but I was reading the site for about a month or so before I signed up for an account myself. I'm not as interested in putting up a ton of nodes (at seven years I've only averaged 5 nodes a year... and most of those were pre-bar) and I've never really been one to just dive right in and start writing. Maybe a sort of new-user sandbox is a great idea. Let them get to know the place first before they start to post. As a community we have a lot of unspoken rules and methods that can be damn hard to discern. How long will it take to teach people that Webster is a 'bot? Or that all those Nov. 13 1999 write-ups are holdovers that well, we've never been bothered to delete? That we tend to support things that show effort has been put into them, rather than just quick one-off hack jobs done to fill up some empty space? That we'd often rather have nothing than have it done badly? That sometimes we really can be a bunch of pricks and downvote something just because we disagree with it, or dislike it, or because it doesn't conform to the unspoken idea of what E2 should be that is different for us all?
E2 is a tough place and it probably needs to get better before too long. As far as factuals go even I've started checking Wikipedia rather than E2 a while back. The thing is, what Wikipedia will never have is what new users will give us. We can show greater voices. We can give variety, opinion, perspective, insider secrets, tradecraft, advice... all the stuff that Wikipedia won't dare touch for fear of it not being staid and neutral enough.
We need a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, but who else uses downvotes these days? Even if it does feel good to vote down that really, really, terrible write-up don't most similar sites generally rely on only using positive feedback (e.g. Digg IIRC) to separate out what gets noticed? Could we perhaps do that here as well? Let nodes run long with write-ups, but push up the higher voted ones? Could we set up a sandbox for new noders where under level one your nodes only appear to people who set their filters to read your posts as on Slashdot when you post AC?
Right now we're a site that isn't as popular, as big, or as notable as Wikipedia and because of that most new users won't find out about us or even care about us. When they find their way here they feel confused, assaulted, and degraded and then they just leave either out of boredom or anger. If we find a way to make things a bit more open it will hurt the signal to noise ratio we currently enjoy, but dammit, at least we'll have some more actual signal as well.