This is how the actual status of the proposal on Area51 looks:
It is significantly better than it looked some weeks ago (there was time when 3 out of the 5 criteria were in "Needs Work" status). This is clearly an improvement.
But the "Questions per Day" criteria of the site is clearly bad, and what makes this worse, earlier it was even over 5.
In my experience, this type of suggestion is often highly unpopular on other meta sites. I am sorry for that.
Concurrently I experience a growing ratio of successful close votes. The probable reason behind that is the growing need to improve the site quality. But please consider: behind these Area51 criteria is a lot of experience of the SE community managers in starting/building up these communities, and this experience is based on statistics which we can't see. And they are doing this as part of their job.
If your moderating/reviewing ideas may have the side-effect of narrowing the scope of the site, my suggestion would be to postpone this at least to when the site leaves its current "public beta" status. I think now a central community should be built up, and it seems that in the current status, we need new members.
My suggestion is to target only the border cases, of course which is unsalvageable crap, and should go. But in the border cases, I suggest to do every alternative before a vote to close. Don't forget: closing somebody's question is a highly unpleasant experience, and in the case of the newbies there is a significant chance that this newbie will be lost. And with it, the site loses not only his actual question, but all of the content he could have created later.
At the end of this road we could even find Beer SE with its 0.1 question/day ratio. Don't do this. Instead of this,
- Try to edit the question to a salvageable form (I think a highly changed question is still much better than a closed one).
- Try to advise the newbie, instead of a silent close vote.