Personally I feel that, as long as the goal is to keep a tolerant/progressive community while ALSO reducing trigger-happy no-dissent-allowed insanity (which NeoGAF is rightly being criticized for), this goal can be accomplished. But it cannot be accomplished by going back to the old ways with different mods.
It can only be accomplished by complete transparency in moderating. That means:
1. Extremely explicit rules about what is allowed and what is not. This can be established by committee of intelligent people, in the open. This can change over time to include new rules, as petitioned transparently by the community.
Extremely explicit rules means list what's allowed and what isn't, with representative examples. Even a thread like this provides plenty of examples. You can say, for example, that using the term SJW non-ironically is grounds for a minor ban, and explain why. You can say that using a studies-show-blacks-have-lower-IQ argument -- no matter how apparently civil or meek -- means permanan. AND you can say that disagreeing with gay marriage on religious grounds is NOT in ITSELF a bannable offense. And so on and so forth.
Same with console war type posts. What's allowed or not could be explicitly written down. That way people don't get banned for criticizing Switch in a Switch thread. Unless that's an actual rule.
2. Extremely transparent moderation. If someone is banned, it should be possible to know exactly what rule they broke. That way unfair moderation cannot be protected by secrecy (except where there's some privacy matter which is rare). But this also means no one can ever complain about unspecified unfair moderation -- as they do today -- as almost every ban would be clearly justified in a consistent way.
I'm not saying it's not challenging. It's basically a simple system of laws and a very simple court system. But it would work.
(And no, you can't say this is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. Yes, 9/10 tweets from people with Scorpio icons claiming GAF banned them for nothing are bullshit. I bet it wasn't for nothing. BUT, absolutely it's clear there are many examples of hair-trigger bans for almost nothing as well.
The whole POINT of the above suggestion is that by bringing it all into he light will remove all the mystery from it and clearly show whose whining is justified and whose isn't.)
3. That, and IMO EviLore cannot continue to represent the place day-to-day due to the inadequate and unilateral and IMHO arrogant response to this and a couple of other crises. And that's assuming he isn't guilty of harassment. That's the other problem, the way EviLore apparently operates.
But those three problems solved, this place could thrive.
Or it could continue in its current zombie form and probably be all right if one stays away from fanboy wars and politics. But presumably people want a higher standard reached....