I've thought up a way for mod abuse to be limited, for shitposting and brigading to be minimized, and for sub-forum creation and discovery to be easier. It starts by thinking about what a sub-forum is, from a different point of view.
Think of a sub-forum as a little retail shop; this one specializes in auto parts, that one in little floofy things that old ladies like, another in kid's toys, and so on. Think of the submissions as the retail goods, the things that people come into the shops to find.
When a power wrench arrives at the kid's toy shop, it is not destroyed. It's not put on the display window either, it's set aside with the idea that it will eventually be taken in by the auto part place, or maybe the hardware shop, or both. The shops owners are curators, not censors. Unwelcome things are not vaporized, they are preserved for whoever else might want them. This means that the shop owners are free to accept and reject things as they wish without penalty or harm.
With that model in mind, consider what a forum would look like if it were built around the following rules:
1) Each subforum page is comprised of two lists of submissions, rather than one list of submissions and a sidebar, like we have now. The bigger list on the left is the approved submissions, and the small list on the right is all the submissions that the moderator has removed. Their only purpose of the mods is to sort submissions into one of the two lists. That's all they do, it's the only power they have. The list of removed items is not in your face, but it's easy to browse if you want, and it's expected that users would do so.
2) Posts in any sub-forum can be submitted to any other forum with one click, even after they have been removed.
3) Moderators and users can populate their forums by adding the sorts of posts they want to see, from anywhere. Moderators are basically selling curation, they are selling the collection of like-minded things, and they are no longer bound to only accepting submission from their readers.
4) The chicken-and-egg problem for starting a new sub-forum is eliminated. A good mod can create a cool place full of good content as a starting point to attract his community, and people can discover it by viewing the history of how each post is shared. A good post can appear in places the original author never even heard of.
5) Moderator abuse is intrinsically limited. Nothing is ever deleted or fully hidden away. Moderators get to keep their part of the main page curated the way they like, but everything remains easily visible and can be easily rebroadcast by anyone.
6) Low-quality, duplicate sub-forums that just rebroadcast the same old stuff will still die of neglect, same as now. You can't sell your curation services if you're not able to do it in a good and original way.
7) Shitposting and brigading becomes less rewarding because the low-quality content is less disruptive, and nobody can scream censorship. Low-quality posts just get set aside, and remain there for whoever wants them. If nobody wants them, they are ignored. A shitpost with 30 upvotes can be removed from the forum without anyone caring, because this is what the mods are supposed to do in this model. If you can't find a mod who wants your shitpost on their approved list, then the number of fake upvotes it got are irrelevant.
8) By default, when a submission is shared to another sub-forum, each sub-forum will display only their own comments. This allows communities of very different interests to have different conversations about a given submission. But there is a button which will allow you to see every comment from every forum, and allow you to interact with those as you like. This solves yet another problem that we currently have, where comments are fragmented whenever a popular item is re-posted.
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[–] Kromulent [S] ago
Maybe I've missed your first point, but trolls can easily post or repost anything in any sub right now. My suggestion does not do anything to make this harder, but it does not really make it easier either.
As for your (hypothetical) preppers example, under the current system, your post would simply be removed and be gone forever. Under the new system, it would still remain visible to your intended audience - the other folks at the preppers forum who did not have anything against you - and they could rescue it, or at least read it. That seems like a net gain.
I do appreciate that the whole idea collapses if people don't get it, and try to interact with it like they do on a typical forum. That alone is probably enough to kill the idea.