There are sites where the moderation isn't bad enough for me to notice it, sure. SSC and Xenosystems come to mind.

The only non-blog sites I pay attention to anymore are this and a few forums, and the only forum that's big enough to need moderation is the one where the admin is incompetent.

The most common strategy I've seen besides the Hastings Banda one is the one where moderator action is only taken to enforce near-unanimous user opinion -- though often this isn't an explicit policy, but instead an artifact of most of the old regulars being moderators. If the mods are active enough with this strategy, this brings protection against the eternal September, but with the potential cost of exclusivity. Another failure mode I've seen is conflict between moderators, but I've only seen this happen once, and it was in a case where someone who really shouldn't have been a moderator was made one: he rarely posted, but had developed a relevant site and was friends with the admin, so he was made another admin -- whereas the moderators were everyone who had over 50 posts a few months after the forum had started, and the moderator position was initially created only to deal with spambots.