I know you weren't calling me a snake, I'm not insulted XD. You're actually trying to answer an existing concern, and so am I, we're just taking different paths and that's respectable.
I will be honest, I find it completely ridiculous and meaningless, and even somewhat deceitful towards the players lol. There's one thing that's concievable, though: that people don't like staff acting as staff in a game they're in, even if they make it clear they aren't talking as players. In an ideal world, it would never happen, but sometimes, game integrity seems too heavily threatened by rulebreaking. That's a big part of why I recently posted a "FM Staff is hiring!" thread, and why Deathworlds was hired: we needed someone to be able to do this when needed from an external perspective, and who is clearly not acting as a player with absolutely no ambiguity possible.
So, if there's a good move towards the playerbase, it consists of staff deciding to avoid "putting the mod hat on" and to contact a staff member who's not involved in the game for an independent view and a warning in-game if the independent staff member deems it necessary...
Which was already decided way before all of this (again, hence why Deathworlds was hired), and was actually prompted by
@FrostByte
's feedback on the matter (it's not because I take a formal tone that I'm saying bullshit, sir, your civil and honest feedback truly was appreciated :P). It should now be pretty much always possible, because there'll always be someone available under a reasonable delay to check things out, so this shouldn't cause issues.
And again, if I may just say,
in-game enforcement is up to hosts. When you host, the rules you define give you a lot of power and a lot of responsibilities. In an ideal world, things wouldn't go out of hand because hosts would warn and replace if needed. Not blaming anyone, just stating a reality.
I believe the staff policy I described above (about having a non-participating staff member check the situation independently instead of having things such as "mod hat on") should answer the concerns.