How I'm reading the whole thing:

Reddit Inc. has been using this idiotic tool for community management, that categorises users into five tiers of "potentially bad", based on criteria weakly correlated to spammers. It's opaque to users but those are stupid trash anyway, so no need for transparency. Now we want mods to use it instead of the flawed but slightly less opaque age/karma requirements.

That's bad on a thousand levels. It's assumptive, opaque, and it lumps together spammers and shitty users (both are bad but they're different cans of worms).

If they actually wanted to improve mod duties in Reddit, here's what they'd actually do:

• Parity of mod tools across old.reddit, the mobile site, new.reddit, and the shitty app. Plenty mods are older (in acc age) users who hate the later two (for good reasons).
• A somewhat clean interface where you can filter relevant info about any given user, such as: content submitted to your sub, subs that he commonly contributes with, a space for you to annotate things, etc.
• Have a SINGLE space where you can edit the rules and they'll automatically update across all interfaces that users use, including: old.reddit, new.reddit, the wiki, the report system etc..
• Warn moderators about a surge of users in your sub, who also interact with another sub. That would be a godsend against brigades.
• Actually suspend users circumventing permabans. If the user will be back under another username, you simply give up enforcing the rules. Fuck, myself circumvented permabans all the time to shitpost.
• Stock replies. A lot of mod duty boils down to talk with the users shit like "don't do this", "do that".

Any of those would already improve mod duties. But actually making this shit takes dev hours and brings value to the platform, you can't have that! Instead you need to pick on the age/karma restrictions for the wrong reasons (they don't let Reddit Inc. to open the gates for new suckers).

Make sure to read the discussion in the thread, users still modding that place are calling out plenty issues. Also, OP, thank you for linking the archive!