Building a culture of moderation that promotes transparency and not using mod tools as your pet ideological argument winning device is not a lot to ask.

There seems to be zero ethical guidelines / pressure / consequences for any of this stuff.

Of course the problem is hard but I've seen tons of high quality, on-topic comments with 500+ upvotes get removed because the mods obviously disagreed with it. The commenter won't even know it's gone and 99% of visitors will not realize how thoroughly editorialized the entire conversation threads are.

I seriously recommend picking any even slightly controversial r/science post and look at the comments being removed. It's not just memes and trolling.