Just as an extra datapoint, I’m a member of another forum that has one main admin/moderator who works traditional business hours and a selection of TL4 community members who act as ‘mini-mods’ (so not even any category moderators), and as a TL4 on that site I find I have lots of powers to edit public post content when it’s inappropriate [1], close or unlist topics as necessary, set slow mode, etc. We don’t have Personal Messages or Chat, which makes things easier, but you can gate those features behind trust levels if they’re being misused on your site, as well as locking certain user’s trust levels below that threshold if they persistently misuse them.
FWIW, I find that there are some quite powerful tools available to trusted community members without needing to grant full moderation powers (whether TL4 or category moderators), and you can also revoke these if you find those community members are not as trusted as you thought.
I think in another topic you mentioned being reluctant to check the staff logs to review behaviour, but I would say that these can be excellent for keeping track of users with higher abilities - and you can quickly revoke any from users who aren’t in line with your forum’s ethos.
doubly useful in conjunction with having no public edit history ↩︎