As Tobias mentioned, it will be very hard to debug which settings are affecting this, especially without being to see your site and all the settings you’ve changed since it sounds like you’ve made a lot of changes (including category settings and so on)
Could you search “approve” in site settings and show a screenshot of any settings you’ve changed? (forum.example.com/admin/site_settings)
Here are the default settings:
I also recommend only changing settings one at a time depending on your community needs as they come up – the default values are configured to work for most communities.
For the minimum scores, they don’t affect the approval flow for posts. This is for hiding posts like when posts are flagged by the community.