Erm… I admittedly feel a little out of the loop here.
Measure 1 seems okay, if last-resort to me. Measures 2 and 3 I'm not too sure of.
I'd be happy to close the forum for maybe a day per month just as a general holiday or the like, but really we should never need to do that. Maybe it's a general thing that happens when we're at 30+ unanswered threads or the like, but definitely not a day per week. I don't know if the discussion was finished here.
Regarding the application queue… I think I mentioned it in admin chat, but we don't need to limit the queue to x number of apps per day. Personally, I'd found that when we get slammed with more than 80 incoming apps, leaving 20-30 pending at the end of the day works fine. For the days when there's only about 40-50 in the docket, it's usually okay to just process all of them. But again, there's no guarantee that it always won't result in the forums getting overwhelmed because sometimes there are just a lot of people who join with sandbox pages ready to go with no ideas checks. Again… I feel like more discussion is warranted here.