Given that Kaj_Sotala was apparently the only active moderator, it probably makes sense to at least try to get a new one. We should nominate new moderators, and one of the current moderators can confirm that the people are interested and appropriate for the role.
I would nominate Viliam_Bur. I went through the recent comment history of the all the top 30 contributors, and Viliam has many recent comments and a polite style of commenting that I think is a marker for someone being a good moderator.
At one point I was planning on making a contribution. It was difficult just getting the code setup and there was very little documentation on the big picture of how everything was supposed to work. It is also very frustrating to run in a development mode. For example, on Mac you have to run it from within a disk image, the VM didn’t work, and setting up new user accounts for testing purposes was a huge pain.
I started trying to understand the code after it was set up, and it is an extremely confusing mess of concepts with virtually no comments, and I am fluent in web development with Python. After 4-6 hours I was making progress on understanding what I needed to make the change I was working on, but I wasn’t there yet. I realized that making the first trivial contribution would probably take another 10-15 hours and stopped. The specific feature I was going to implement was an admin view link that would show the usernames of people who had upvoted / downvoted a comment.
The issues list on GitHub represents at least several hundred hours of work. I think 3 or 4 contributors could probably do a lot of damage in a couple months of free time, if it weren’t quite so unenjoyable. $10K is definitely a huge underestimate for paying an outsider. I do think that a lot of valuable low-hanging fruit, like stopping karma abuses and providing better admin tools, could be done for $10-20K though.