I would argue that power does corrupt to a degree, and the people you hang around changes your mentality. But it goes without saying that there are good mods and bad ones, but the thing is, if you act as a collective you will be judged as a collective. You mention some good ideals of what a moderator should be like, but they fall short of reality. I know through personal experience that you can be silenced without even knowing what you did wrong, and you have to jump through hoops just to find out. Like, you have to mass mail the mod list and just hope that one of them takes enough interest in your problem. If you have a system with little bottom-up accountability and little recourse for average users, then I don't see how that cannot create an unfair system and moderators with an imperious attitude. And consequently, an "us vs them" mentality.
Like you say, it would be good if there was more communication between the users and mods, though I've found that mods that will actually take the time to have a conversation with you are in the minority. All there needs to be is just a little more communication, transparency and accountability, and things would be much better. Any changes towards these sort of thing are rejected by peppy on grounds that it will "cause drama", well of course drama and friction is an intrinsic facet of human interaction and aren't necessarily bad as they can achieve some purpose. But suppressing drama with a heavy-handed autocratic system isn't a good solution, then everyone will just go to Reddit and have an anti-mod circlejerk there. Anyway, I appreciate your insight.