There is a whole discussion somewhere on meta about admins vs moderators, and how much trust to put in them. The discourse team all have admin privs here on meta, for example, as you can see on the about page. Personally I limit it (just two of us have admin privs) and then the two of us own the hassle of having to run reports and share them with the rest of the team. This is less than ideal - really we just limit the access to avoid having to train everyone on what to stay away from. Not everyone on my team is interested in seeing all the admin features, even if we do trust them with the data.
Can you give an example of the type of analysis moderators need to be allowed to do?
I’ve often wished for the ability to create a query, and then make just that query available to moderators. Or the ability to have the results of a query sent to me (or another discourse user) on a schedule, along the lines of the user export which is niftily delivered by PM.