I don't really have much to add on, but I do agree that as of now, there should be some re-workings on the tier 1 rules.
Maybe someone already said this (gotta re-read this thread), but even if someone has the nessessary 5,000 bytes, the justification for that tier still needs to be good or clear, and not just 5,000 bytes saying "[He/She/It] is the strongest being ever!" and leaving it at that, or making that character
feel like you're saying that.
I found that there's this neat thing for OCs called the
Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test , where you take a test on how much of a Mary/Gary Sue your character is. It's used on the Death Battle Fanon Wikia for OCs. It's a pretty long test, and not many people have time to do this, but maybe we can do something similar for here. Maybe do a thread of questions people can answer, or something along those lines.
IMO maybe we should simply be more clear in saying "You must have a reasonable explanation for your character, be it explained in-universe, their personality, etc...", or even give tips to the creator of that character, push them in the right direction.
(Oh god, this reminds me of back in 6-7th grade when I created this dumb OP Mary Sue character that was supposed to represent me or something. Good thing that phase is over.)
And I believe that's all, hope I added something new. Oh, and one final thing, I like Prom's idea about reviewing tier 1 (and 0) pages. That would probably work quite well.