A week ago, I received a (EDIT: third) warning and a subsequent seven day ban for not breaking any rules, as I was informed by a moderator:

You reposted a removed answer. There's no specific rule against that. It's common sense that you should not do that. Answers get removed for a reason, so don't repost them.

This settles the conversation, as far as I'm concerned.

See you next week!

Before this I had received a (EDIT: second) warning for not answering the original poster's question. This was expanded upon in a PM from another moderator, saying that my post had been removed for the following reason:

Our rules requires that top-level answers address the question comprehensively. It is of course fine to point out misconceptions in a question within the context of a broader answer. Your post did not respond to OP's question in a manner one would expect from someone "reasonable degree of expertise in specific areas of the past."

My subsequent ban derived from having reposted my original post by adding it to a second comment. The comment in question was written in response to a comment chain on my original post, and I added my original post with a disclaimer saying:

I will put my top-level answer here to provide context, since it was removed for not answering the original question:

This addition was clearly separated from my response and was in no way an attempt to somehow sneak it past the rules. I was operating under the provided assumption that only top-level answers required to address the question at hand, which I interpreted as permitting me the freedom to respond to a question about my (removed) original post. I was later informed otherwise:

Saying "top-level comment" was my mistake. In fact, AskHistorians rules have not differentiated between comment placement within a thread in 3 years.

This was six hours after I had written my post. Since my response directly expanded upon what I had written in my original post, I felt that my original post, no longer being a top-level answer, still was relevant to my response. It was for this that I received a warning and subsequent ban. This being despite me not violating any rules, as explicitly made clear by the moderators.

I feel that warnings and bans shouldn’t based on common sense, particularly not given the aforementioned misunderstandings, which is all this really is. As with all unspoken guidelines, common sense is open to interpretation. What one individual considers common sense might not correspond to another, and it doesn't necessarily take the situation into account.

This is by no means an attempt to disparage the moderators of this subreddit or the work they do. Their dedication to this subreddit's rules is a large part of why the quality is so high, but that doesn't mean the outcome always is positive, which I feel is the case here.

The obvious way to proceed is to add a sentence to the rules about contributors under no circumstances reposting removed answers, in full or in part. In addition, I feel that moderators should avoid issuing warnings and subsequent bans for things that are not rule violations, regardless of whether or not it goes against common sense. In this incident neither my actions nor intentions were disingenuous, and a comment or message saying "please do not re-use removed content" would have sufficed.