People don't like it when money trumps all other factors in a concern that perceptively wasn't for sale and threats and dishonesty don't help either.
It appears that nearly everyone involved believes there is a problem including Lee who now needs new paid staff to run what is likely a dwindling community. It sounds like you have an ax to grind personally.
It's not a general problem with civilization needing "law and order" or whatever.
They're also much more technically competent. Look at how the different networks handled the cross-protocol exploit a few years back where a well crafted link could cause the browser to connect to irc and spam. Most other networks required a PING/PONG on connect so they weren't vulnerable. Of the networks that didn't, they were able to mitigate that within minutes to hours by either a simple configuration change or a firewall rule. Freenode was unable to do anything for months. Their solution was to rewrite their entire ircd and tell people not to complain about the spam.
Edit: delete some things I'm probably not qualified to comment on
IIUC it's the staffers/opers that actually run the servers - monitor health, manage the OS, perform software updates, manage ircd, debug issues, cordon broken machines, etc. That's the bulk of the work in order to keep the things actually running. The alternative, providing a server in exchange for powers on the network would clearly be an exchange, not a donation.
Plus, I'm pretty sure many machine donors don't want the extra work of maintaining the entire IRC/software stack, and are quite happy to exchange some spare organizational resources to a good cause. I know I would much rather donate spare rack capacity than to also spend hours maintaining yet another service.
Are these staffers appointed by the community or by other staffers? I would have expected it to be a democratic process. Otherwise it does give off an elitist vibe that ok alludes to.
I don't know, but I honestly don't care that much about it. My limited contact with staffers was excellent, they were helpful and never came off as arrogant (even when people did stupid shit), so effectively I couldn't care less about whether they were democratically elected or not.
The freenode "staffers" just don't like the fact that someone was able to win the irc game (i.e., gaining more power) without following their invented arbitrary bureaucracy and dedicating their life to idling in the right set of channels.
This whole thing is really off topic and should be taken to ##wrongplanet .