The fact is that the logical conclusion of this is that a moderator needs to review every post in a thread and whether or not it breask the rules, because if we aren't going by what's reported, there is nothing that makes one conversation more worthy 6of an examination than another conversation. And you can't appeal to the fact that the conversation was important e enough to warrant a report because you are also arguing that reports are not indicative of anything other than that the moderator needs to see what is going on in the thread. So why should their assessment even be limited to a specific conversation? As you say, users put up with a lot before they report anything, so clearly there coudl have been behavior that is at least borderline that was not engaged with at all vis a vis the report tool.
Mods do pretty consistently look at the thread's context, but they do so to assess the report. Assessing a single post can frankly be a substantial amount of work; sometimes in the context of Rule 3 or something of course, it is a matter of if something is a straight insult or not, but even that can be slightly more murky, and there can be contextual factors that can influence how severe the breach is considered in some specific contexts. An infraction is sometimes clear cut, but can sometimes be actively context-dependent. The rules are actively intended to be up for interpretation and be very case-by-case because we tried a stricter ruleset and that doesn't work, but it does mean that assessing whether or not a post breaks the rules requires more assessing of context and consideration and personal judgment.
Asking for a moderator to assess an entire thread, or even just an entire conversation, is a big burden to put on a volunteer when you're asking that they do it for every single infraction. There have been cases when a moderator has to sweep a thread, this is a tremendous effort that even if you split it into teams, which has occurred, takes a significant amount of time that could be spent on other reports or just, you know, doing anything aside from unpaid moderation work.
I respect that you have experience in this area, but it is you having experience in this area that confuses me as to this being your conclusion. And that's setting aside the fact that even if I accepted your argument, it still has no place in an appeal, it is something that you have several avenues to bring up, as I noted, and I didn't even mention discussing it with a member of Council who can then directly raise the point to Administration themselves, if yoiu don't want to bring that much attention to the issue or believe that doing so isn't productive from a user's end. Like even if I accepted your aregument, it simply isn't a good argument for an appeal, especially since "Administration" being able to answer that isnt' something that gets handled in an appeal, because the only party involved in the appeal process like, 95% of the time at this point is arbitration. Council doing it involves people who can't even defend themselves not only having their posts litigated, but litigated and debated in a conversaton that will proceed to be public and read by the entire forum, so I would think that that wouldn't be seen as ideal either?