At least from my point of view, FA is still the art gallery "nexus" of the fandom, even though the design of the site can only be described as ancient :D
However, I never had any real contact with the moderators, so I can't really tell you a lot about them.

I was on FurAffinity for about a year or two, I made a mistake joining. I've been an outspoken critic of their staff for years, but gave into peer pressure from my local furry scene. I abandoned my account and have never looked back. FA's rule enforcement is completely ass-backwards. Dragoneer has taken advantage of FA's community multiple times in the past and he's bound to do it again. FA's security has been described as having more holes than Swiss cheese; I have noticed FA tends to get hacked roughly once every five years with the most recent attack being in 2016. A former dev leaked a list of site exploits in 2010, not sure how many of those have been patched. I completely understand going there for more customers as FA is where they are, but there are better places to conduct business. The furry side of Twitter seems to be a good alternative from what I've seen.