When I first joined the site, I was impressed by the general level of posting and debate, both in the TW and the D&D area. In particular, some people stood out. More often than not, those people had Citizen badges. They stood out not because of their badges, but because of the general level of their posting.
Of course there were some Citizens whose debating skills did not seem quite as impressive as those of others, but from their signature I soon found out that these people had apparently contributed as great modders or e.g. in Content Staff. This too motivated me to become a Librarian and eventually the editor of the Helios way back in the day.
While the word "contributions" is naturally vague, my standard for Citizenship has been shaped by my many years here on TWC, both as a regular member and as a Citizen, not to mention my time in the CdeC. And to avoid accusations of perceived recent CdeC elitisim: I was in the CdeC before 2011, quite a while ago.
EDIT: Just to emphasise, I'm not saying that lolIsuck doesn't fulfill any of those criteria, I'm merely explaining my view on Citizenship and contributions.
Posting in chat threads is a great thing and many people I greatly respect such as Chloe have participated like that. However, Chloe also has an impressive amount of tangible contributions from all areas of TWC outside of her posting in the various Chat threads.
But my main aim here is something else, namely to encourage people to research candidates more extensively. This is not a complaint about the current system -- in fact, the recent CdeCs also often did little to share their research in the application thread. However, I hope that application threads can go beyond everyone stating that the candidate definitely deserves it, that he's a sure Yes and that there can be no doubt about his contributions, all without any arguments or sources. Even if a candidate is a shoe-in (which I don't think is necessarily the case here), it would greatly benefit the Curia if posts assessing the candidate went beyond establishing his worthiness in one or two lines.
I have been a CdeC councilor for about 18 months back in 2009-2010 and I can tell you that the standards then were not considerably lower than they are now. It would be arrogant to claim that I know whether lolIsuck would have passed back then with his current contributions, but I'm fairly certain that it would not have been a unanimous Yes vote.