Abstract: Several deep mathematical and physical results such as Kontsevich’s deformation-quantization, Drinfeld’s associators, and the Deligne hypothesis are controlled by the vanishing of certain obstruction classes in the theory of differential graded operads. I will talk about a way to obtain such vanishing results, as well as higher-genus analogues, using a weight theory implied by a new motivic point of view on the conformal operad.