That's what I've always seen "drama and shit" plus nobody likes their decision making questioned publicly.
Like Momo, I once moderated and administrated video game forums, and whenever it was tried it just escalated into feuding that made the moderators act worse. But I am quite libertarian, so I almost never banned people so my views on moderation are weird.
NeoGAF.com's primary issue is its size and the inability for the staff to have their own discussions about setting codes of conduct that are more uniform and CLEAR, so they fall into the lazy modbot/IRC route which lets them have quicker trigger fingers and it seems their checks and balances system fell apart because we know they at one point had further discussions about this and something similar to every user having a ban record and so on that unnamed admin was able to circumvent.
I've personally had bans shortened after the fact for no rhyme or reason other than I assume some mod came along and thought a week was better than a month or something. But even though that's beneficial to me in terms of posting, it's not in terms of what gets you banned how, and if the two moderators didn't discuss my ban before one adjusting it that's arguably as big of problem as moderators handing out too harsh of bans from the point of view of something coherent.
And the community thread stuff is a whole other discussion. Those are almost always breakdowns in communication among the staff because some are aware of it but it's someone else who comes in and massacres the place. Whereas a clear policy would be that the staff member familiar would be used as a conduit to warn and such before the axe comes down.
