Pretty impressive input for such a new topic 
That’s good, with the existence of flags it would seem that a flag would first need to be triggered to start the process, then evaluated by a moderator as a third party to evaluate, it the flag is skipped and a moderator elects to make a judgment call that may indicate the action was not offensive in the first place.
I previously had a user complain about off topic comments, so a policy was put in place that the original poster could put a “do not derail” notice in their thread
That policy was intended to pacify both, people who like a clean topic and those who like to see where a topic might go
Either can create a thread, the populous then gravitated accordingly
It turned out not to ever be used, people in general were not so offended by off topic comments
But if the TOS are no off topic comments, then not enforced equally and constantly , only selectively and only by moderation, then the true consensus of the community is not accurately represented.
But if again, some don’t like their topics commented on off topic then perhaps a small standard group of check boxes could be placed in the head of any topic, this free’s moderators and empowers the original poster
This itself could be deemed off topic, the topic is about viewing moderator actions, but you did great bringing up tools to help moderate, I personally think the people are the best tool, they flag what they don’t like, that can be abused too, I just believe if the system is more transparent it will also be more natural, clean is not always best, penicillin was discovered by accident, one of the biggest advances of modern medicine, if we allow unchecked moderation we may miss our next
advancement, someone somewhere else may achieve it too and propel a new system, FB took over Myspace without much effort, just enough to make people happy.