I just learned that the probably “typical” moderator in the community, a “category moderator”, won’t have special powers to delete or silence other users. Actually the only “special” power as opposed to a TL4 level which can also be reached by power users is to review posts and flags.
This does not really justify all the proposed overhead of polling.
We should focus more on encouraging regular users of the forum which demonstrated communication skills in terms of mediating between conflicts and such to get involved into moderation, instead of thinking about rules to protect from a not existing thread.