This isn’t an ITL decision. First of all, the active moderation team for this forum is composed of volunteers from the Qubes community, not ITL members. (ITL members with forum privileges aren’t active in moderating and mainly use them for internal staff communication and admin tasks, like announcements. I stepped back from moderating years ago.) Second, the Discourse forum software has the trust level system built in and turned on by default. As users gain higher trust levels (from 0 to 4), they gain some mod-like abilities, but the powerful abilities are gated behind TL4, which requires manual promotion by default.
Your beef is primarily with the Discourse developers, because you disagree with their philosophy about how a web forum should work, which is fair. Your secondary beef is with the moderation team for not overriding the default trust level system in Discourse. Whether the trust level system is the optimal fit for the Qubes community is a reasonable question that the mod team has already considered pretty extensively, but I’m sure that if you present cogent arguments against it, the mod team will be happy to listen and consider your reasoning. Flinging around unfounded accusations and jumping to conclusions isn’t likely to further your cause, though.
One thing I’ll point out is that the amount of moderation this forum requires is significant, and the bandwidth of the mod team appears to be overwhelmed at times. Having high-trust-level users able to pitch in to help with some light mod tasks currently relieves some of the burden. If we, as a community, get rid of this mechanism, we’d either need to add more official mods to the mod team (hard to do when there aren’t enough suitable volunteers, plus they’d probably just be those same high-trust-level users anyway) or accept that more rule-breaking content will go unmoderated.
Our mods and high-trust-level users are giving up their free time to try to help make this forum a better place for all of us to enjoy – an often thankless task that most of us aren’t willing to volunteer for. By its nature, much of the work they do is invisible: When a bad post, thread, or account gets moderated, most of us never have to see it. As a result, we often don’t notice the good work they do; we only notice when there’s something we disagree with or don’t like. It’s fine to express that disagreement in a civil way, but let’s just try to remind ourselves that we’re enjoying the fruits of their labor and try not to take it for granted.