If you really cared about the site, you'd spend less time making these threads, and more time streamlining your thoughts so moderators could read through them quickly. Instead, every thousand words you make the administration read is another second they could be working on new content (irony at work, right?), answering messages from people who may actually have similar concerns but pick more direct venues for these thoughts, and spending less time paying attention to the usual malcontents who thrive in threads like these.
I can't imagine the answer is anything I want to hear, but I'm endlessly curious as to what your idealized end-goal is here. Do you want the forum community to collectively rise up and overthrow the corrupt higher-ups? If so, I can happily recommend ResetEra [https://www.resetera.com/], a forum made by former NeoGAF mods who departed following the recent social outcry of the creator's behavior. If you really desperately believe that is your promised land, I encourage to go out and live your dreams.
If you want a more open community, one of the first things you'll have to accept is that it won't always happen. You continue to repeat "It doesn't have to be the way it is" like we don't already know that, but stuff has operated the way it has for over a decade now for a reason. It's not the only reason we'll listen to, but it's wisdom we aren't just throwing out as a matter of course. User privacy is non-negotiable, so the apparent incessant demand to justify everything we do, moderation-wise, will never happen. If you don't like it, I'm sorry; leave. Total transparency will likewise never happen, and for practical reasons. Ideas go from 0 to 90% completed constantly, and can go from being considered to being shuttered at any time. Sometimes things change in the space of a few minutes, and chronicling all of these changes means nothing to 95% of the population. And the 5% will only care long enough to make more threads like these, which take more time from the administration, and create more posts like these which will inspire more threads like these, which take more time from the administration, and create more...
You get the picture.
If you really want change, I'm happy for you, but public spectacles aren't the way to do it. They only ever waste time. The change you want to enact may never come, but any change at all from this system you're clearly unhappy with will never be improved or accelerated by threads like these.
So please stop wasting our time.
If you want this to be a discussion among the community about how to improve the rules, that's fine. Discuss. But if you want to put up long-winded wanted posters about the moderation and administration under the veil of wanting "communication," then the only thing that you'll create for us is staff hours spent on nothing--time we'll never get back and a community that will feel empowered to keep demanding. If you want a moderation team that listens to you, think about the rammifications of your tone, structure, and argument. Make it as easy for us as possible so we can actually do stuff with it without long internal conversations and deviations to deal with people in this thread--both for and against moderation--who are all sharpening their torches and lighting their pitchforks. If you want a site that is vastly different from the one that's here at present, then find a different site. None of us have the educational background of lawyers (at least not since DEFY fired them), nor are any of us paid even fractions of the money they do to care about the exhausting minutae you seem convinced is the only way the Escapist will ever be good.
Whatever you want, there are countless better ways to do it. All this unpaid work does is slow down the rest of the work that any of us should be doing, or better yet, would have already done without all of this.
