Edit:
Moderation is overhead and does not directly contribute to the purpose of these sites, which is to answer questions.
Suggestion:
Instead of simply being, or not being, a moderator, I suggest giving users the ability to earn "moderation points" based on their answers to questions. "Answering a question", from a moderation standpoint, could be as simple as deleting a question rather than just marking it as "not our problem" or "try again" (and letting it sit there for years). Likewise, frivolous and/or excessive moderation just needs to be (re)defined. A user that flags a question for editing, rather than make the edit that they are (overly)qualified to make themselves, should lose "moderation points" to encourage them to "get dirty". Does a second moderator really need to be notified and manually come in after XX days/months to re-moderate it? Why is one moderator not enough?
Another of my analogies:
This reminds me of Office Space where the management is constantly complaining about the workload and hassle of dealing with "TPS reports". We find out later it's actually his secretary's, secretary's, secretary that actually does all the work regarding them. Another employee explains that he "deals with the customer so the engineers don't have to" and when the "Bob's" (firing consultants) ask him "What, exactly, do you do here?", he has no (good) answer. The employee just hysterically repeats "Look, I told you!! I deal with the GD customer's so the engineers don't have to". Ultimately, management was about to be reorganized and made to work when the office mysteriously burned down...
I think we need that here, now, because the end-result of moderation should always be either:
The question being answered
or
The question being deleted
The current moderation system guarantees neither. The many thousands of moderated, but unanswered, questions lingering highlights that. If our true purpose is to answer questions and not just to sort them, we're only being about 50% efficient.