User blog comment:BertH/User rights updates for Forum and Message Wall/@comment-25653892-20150121154620/@comment-5275700-20150121170839

It's a good point, and indeed removing options from regular users is not something done lightly. The original vision for the "anyone can remove/restore" setup was meant to preserve the "wiki spirit" of openness and the editability of talk pages and wiki-style forums (where anyone could potentially edit anyone else's text). But in practice, there was often abuse and we received many requests to restrict the remove/restore abilities.

If there have been helpful regular users in a community who used the abilities to clean up spam, it seems like they might be good moderator candidates.