1. A reddit request was made in 2018 when you were banned. This was manually approved by the admins: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/8m8cdm/reque...

2. The new mod heavily restricted posts, seemingly for three years. They declined to reply to messages for nine months, until a new Reddit request happened on Jan 3 2021. A comment in that thread said "there hasn't been a new post in ages!", confirming your replacement had locked the place down: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/kpf083/reque...

3. Sometime between Jan 3 and Jan 19th, the request was approved. Likely closer to the 19th, the day the new mod posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/radioastronomy/comments/l0j6qj/new_...

Sub seems alright now, but after a three year long false start with an inactive mod who locked the place down.

Further, it took up to 16 days to handle the request. For a very small sub. And I've seen reddit requests take much longer.

Now reddit would have to, at a stroke, replace at least 8,000 of their most active subs, all at once, and make sure they don't appoint people who are insane, or draconian, or power hungry, or in it for their own profit, etc.

I don't see this working. You may have some knowledge of /r/radioastronomy in those periods which contradicts what I wrote, but the public record suggests the transition wouldn't bode well for mass replacing every single moderator at once.

92% of reddit is down right now.