I actually wanted to reply to something you said. I would have made that same post in a political topic on Congregation and it would have not been deleted. I am 99.9% confident of that. The one time I ever felt like something too harsh happened on Congregation was when me (and like 20 people) were infracted in a topic for making posts that were too short...since that was not personal though, I took it in stride and just made longer or more incisive posts if I was too lazy to make a long post....firebot moderators believe in overmoderating, Congregation moderators just believed in preventing arguments from getting stale or people flaming each other back and forth, I mean you know better than me about the specific things they looked for probably.
tl;dr smogon has become a big forum, and despite its roots ended up exactly like how every big forum does, oh well!