You may or may not recall, but DDO originally had true open voting. There was votebombing, counter vote bombing, and people got fed up, we’re posting different threads complaining about it, so they started enforcing that you had to have a valid RFD. Then when people posted RFDs that were obviously wrong, biased or obvious, people complained about those too. So the rules started being enforced to weed those out too. Then people stared complaining that “well this guys was not valid, so how come this one is”, because the rules were nominally generic and gave the mods latitude.
Through a combination of abuse, criticism, and hissyfittery on the part of all the wronged people in the world, outraged that one time one mod came down on an RFD against them, we got to the set of rules we have now.
The RFD rules we have force voters to justify their points under specific conditions, and give reasons for assigning victory. Without those rules spelling out what is and is a valid vote, you are forced to become subjective, and in some cases arbitrary - with the mods being the people who decide whether a subjective RFD meets these generic rules - meaning that mods end up moderating the validity of the content rather than whether the vote gave appropriate reasons, that bad.
The reason the moderators have to work this way, and what I have been pointing out - is people like you (i didn’t specify you specifically are doing this, nor that this is the opinion you hold - so you’re the one misrepresenting my position) are responsible for the rules being like the are - I agree with the reasons.
People could act like grown ups, send PMs (which I don’t always do myself - though I try), and try and be calm, rational and have discussions: but this is always drowned out by the people who see one mod decision and start polls tying to remove a mod from his position, or preemptively start a poll trying to get people to listen to you and change the rules by bypassing direct discussions - or working against the community by spam reporting anyone and everyone.
People like you make practical moderation impossible - because it is literally impossible for them to do anything without being attacked and vilified either by you or someone else on the other side whenever a moderation decision is made.
It is you, and the class of people like you, who are the cause and driver for strict rules, and implicitly tie moderators hands by forcing them to be “fair and unbiased” through this sort of histrionics: derailing an announcement about a new moderator installed to talk about your personal grievances.
Would you want to make a decision if this is the sort of stuff you were subjected to every time you try and act in good faith? Lock an abusive thread? censorship. Delete a post doxxing another user? Lack of transparency. Remove a vote that a mod (and others) feels violates the standards? They’re biased. Don’t remove it? They’re not exercising their discretion.
This behaviour - the report spamming, the voting threads, the faux outrage here: rather than a rational discussion and some ability to accept decisions in key aspects that don’t go your way is literally the reason we can’t have nice things.
It seems you’re doing your best to try and avoid this key aspect of the interaction between moderation and community.