I don't understand it.
You want to create another place to put posts/articles in?
Why would it not get buried by other articles?

I can understand that the How-to section should be moderate heavily, so only valid and interesting how-to's should stay there and others should be moved to the common pools.

What I'm talking about is something like the articles in CodeProject.

The "Guide & How-tos" forum kind of serves that purpose but it's hard to spot (you don't see it when you enter the community site, to find it you have to click Forums and scroll down to the end of the page)  and is a mess with dozens of posts about completely different subjects all mixed together. To find anything there you have to use the search function by that isn't particularly effective since it works across the entire site and you can't tell it to just search a specific forum or area (forum, academy, forge, ideas) and you get lots of irrelevant results.

The articles area would have lots of sections (just like CodeProject), and would be moderated so that the articles would be in the correct section, in case the author posted them to the wrong one. And, instead of showing the articles by date, it would show them by "best value": articles with more likes would show up before those with less and articles with too many dislikes would be moved to a special "worse of the worst" section.

That's the idea.
:)

I like the idea. But before creating another "Articles" area (which we had until recently) I'll take on the challenge of creating order in the Guides & How-Tos by tagging content appropriately. 
I also agree that it could be easier to get to the Guides & How-Tos...