Leaving submissions up that violate rules leads to selective modding, and we're not willing to do that. Members of the community deserve equal treatment, and as mods we try to simply follow a predefined set of rules vetted and accepted by the community rather than our own subjective judgment whenever that's feasible. We've made the mistake of asking for edits and waiting around in the past. Most of the time the edits do not come, and meanwhile posts are accumulating comments and upvotes, all of which goes out the window once we delete the post after waiting around for an edit that does not come. It's better to remove a post early, and help the OP to make the required edits so that, once resubmitted and it meets all rules, it can thrive. For that reason, quite unintuitively, the better the post quality, the more important it is to catch any rule violations in it early.

We also need to think in the long term, and we want this sub to be as objective and researched as possible. If we let posts that make claims without proper sourcing slip through, we're encouraging laziness and a lack of critical thinking. The more consistent we are with rule enforcement, the better the results will be over time.