I think everything laid out here is perfectly reasonable. Lemmy hasn't made it easy and easy doesnt seem to be on the horizon for that development team.
My personal thoughts is that I don't think that the currrent implementation of lemmy is going to reach a point where the capabilities of the platform is going to meet the requirements of the beehaw project. Definitely not in the near term, and low probability in the scale of years.
If the worse comes about ill probably follow along to where ever beehaw ends up and ill just set up an lemmy acc elsewhere.
I don't envy the situation
// the commenter gives yet another unsolicited solution
I think it would be interesting if yall and other like minded instance admins were to start a federation pact/ code of conduct which would layout the requirements for federation. In my opinion, fostering the kind of online community that beehaw strives to be (as I see it anyways), requires acting outside of the capabilities of the lemmy the platform. Granted, this would require a critical mass of instances willing to sign to such a pact but this may ease the workload from a moderation point of view.
I think this should be a warning to anyone running a federated socmed node. Since twitter had to deal with an absolutely massive userbase and high content generation rate, moderation required a full time department and even then it wasn't perfect. Imagine having to deal with that as a large node admin.