User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: March 7, 2016/@comment-5558012-20160307231322/@comment-126761-20160307235124

I've edited the update note slightly to try and clear up some confusion.

The design of bureaucrats has always been that such that we expect those users have admin rights as well. You are free to be a bureaucrat without admin rights, but you will have a very few specific rights, as intended - basically just the ability to promote and demote admins and content moderators.

Essentially, bureaucrats have some rights that duplicated admin rights due to 'mistakes' during feature creation - resulting in a very strange, eclectic list of items. This caused some people to think bureaucrats are designed as a 'standalone' group, which they are not.

Note that this change does not affect any local customizations that have been made to bureaucrats, and will be an invisible change to almost all.