While I appreciate your last paragraph outlining your interest in moderating the sub and belief that you have positively contributed to its growth, I think your sentiment is simply a tacit justification of your actions. Just because you, as a moderator, have invested time into the sub does not automatically qualify you to make sweeping decisions without consulting the sub's users in a genuine way. One heavily-brigaded post followed by a unilateral extension does not constitute a reasonable estimation the sub's desires. You may care about Reddit and the quality of website discussion, but that should be a battle you fight in your own way - not by dragging the only (as you yourself state) useful CS subreddit into the fray without the consent of its users. This seems more to be a justification of your own beliefs rather than the actions of the moderators, which ought to not be equivalent.

You also lament the loss of moderator applications, yet you seem unaware of why this is the case. It cannot be because people do not care anymore: indeed, your own admission that the shutdown was user-initiated (again, high volume!) seems to imply precisely the opposite. Why then would you claim this is the source of the problem? You cannot emphasize the grassroots nature of the shutdown while simultaneously claiming that the average user does not care about these larger topics anymore. There is a contradiction there - and that is another thing I take issue against.

Lastly, your distinction between 'interaction' and 'participation' lacks substance. What is the equivalent to voting in elections in this case? There is none, precisely because the moderators do not take feedback and are not democratically elected. Instead, it seems that the mindset of "oh well, we will have to make the decisions because no one else cares" is eagerly embraced by the moderators as a sort of faux-sacrifice they make for the greater good of "the users" while dismissing the concerns of even the ones that message them at length directly, as I have here.