At the moment a lot of badge/trust-level related options in the admin cp lack the ability to be edited. Not sure if these will eventually be opened up and we can go ahead and use the settings that we want, instead of being forced to use the ones that discourse provides, but I’ll give a quick rundown.
Currently auto-promotion/demotion cannot be toggled
Can’t edit most of the badge options (mostly wish we could disable badges as titles)
Can’t add powers (rename/edit/delete) to newly created badges
Similar to the above, groups can’t have powers that you can edit (mainly just used to create private categories)
What I’d like to see when adding a new badge is the ability to give it certain moderator powers with it, in the same way leaders/elders have preset powers (which I actually would like to edit, because the jump from leader to elder is a bit too drastic). The group powers issue isn’t really one if we can edit the powers of each trust level somehow, but we can’t.
Preventing all of these powers from being editable somewhere in the admin cp is really, really inconvenient.
Well, the last two bullets are wildly out of scope. Badges are never intended to be associated with abilities; trust levels predate badges and trust levels confer badges, not the other way around.
As far as veterans/elders, if for some reason you don’t meet a requirement. You’re automatically demoted (this is done daily). If you’re manually promoted, you essentially cannot stay an Elder or a Veteran for longer than a day. Allowing the revocation query to be disabled would likely fix this.
Elder has no autopromotion method at all, it is 100% manual. So that isn’t possible.
You can lock users at any trust level, this was implemented a few weeks ago by @sam. Click the lock button next to their trust level in admin settings for that user.