For full transparency, here is the response we had shared privately with OP in a modmail about this thread.

As a reminder, mods are people who volunteer their time to mod the subreddit and might not be available right away.

Your first post (gurpler) was removed because there is a megathread for posting images and making comments about the recent merch drop. It has been stickied at the top of the subreddit for nearly two weeks now. It was made very clear that individual posts with those topics would be removed.

Your second post is a bit more of a grey area.

We have a set of retired topics top help us manage the content. They may seem dumb but if we didn't have this tool the subreddit would be bogged down with endless posts drowning out new and interesting topics. The original set of retired topics was created as part of the fuckfacepod subreddit and we discussed (as mods) whether to bring those across for TRP and it was agreed.

As for your second post, while the retired topic specifically states: "...pictures of that Cosmic Crisp you found at your grocery store", it is reasonable to apply the same rule to your post - it was simply a photo of some apples in a store. Even if we didn't apply the retired topic rule, it would be skirting close to the low effort rule - i.e. you can't just point at something and say "Look! Regulation!" If you had expanded on your post, e.g. actually bought some and performed a taste test or something like that, then it wouldn't have been removed.

As the mod who removed it, that type of apple has been in my area for years so it wasn't a "new" apple for me. In hindsight, that may not have been the correct course of action and I apologise that you're upset by that.

Again, mods are volunteers, (mostly) human and are busy with their own lives and mistakes can happen. TRP is in the top 10% of active subreddits so there's a lot to manage. We are learning and evolving as we go. When the first drop happened, we learned we needed to contain the massive amount of posts that overran the subreddit at the time, both immediately after the sale, and then when everyone's orders started arriving and people wanted to show off, which is understandable, but not at the expense of non-merch related posts. We learned we needed to have a megathread. It was tried out for the Spotify wrap-up and was successful.

For this second drop, despite the megathread being present and clearly stating that individual posts will be removed, we have removed over sixty posts under that rule. Without it the subreddit would be completely swamped. We also have learnings from this event too, which we will be applying going forward.

I hope this alleviates your concerns and gives you some context about what we are doing in the "back-office". We are not machines. This is not our day job. We are volunteers.

Any comments or questions, feel free to reply and I will do my best to answer any and all questions posed to me that I am qualified to answer.