Paid staff would indeed be a huge, huge improvement over ideologically driven no-lifes.
What tipped me over to Reddit's side regarding the API change is the possibility that it will end the practice of mods sharing automated block lists (if you post in a wrongthink subreddit, many other subreddits will preemptively ban you regardless of your actual activity in them, if any). If so, and if there are fewer handfuls of powermods that control dozens/hundreds/thousands of subreddits, I'm all for the change.
This is not to say that I condone what /u/spez did regarding editing /r/The_Donald comments, or misrepresenting what happened on the call with Apollo's owner. Paid staff can and do unduly push their own ideological bents. But when there is a name and a face attached to a company employee, there is some hope of holding people to account. The Challenor mess should never have happened, but at least the person was fired by Reddit. I have never, ever seen any evidence in more than a decade on Reddit of any level of accountability from faceless, nameless mods when they misbehave.
It’s easy for paid mods to remove abuse and illegal content. But it will be much harder for them to filter out off topic or low effort posts.
The altruistic mods left when it became clear they aren’t building a community, they are doing unpaid janny work for a corporation that hates them.