I won't be surprised if the board ousts him over the PR mess he has created in the wake of this. But I highly doubt you can compare the two so closely. The board wants money and is presenting him with strategies. The dude is the CEO and is acting on those recommendations on his own accord. All the earmarks of a tech CEO who has finally drank too much of his own kool-aid. If anything I could see Ellen Pao being entirely his doing - and this is some weird cosmic force of karma coming back for revenge.
So I can't speak for moderation tools. The search question intrigues me because there is a search feature but I can't tell if it has any sort of filter support.
As for the image issues. I just came across stylus and https://github.com/aclist/kbin-css/ - the user experience is worlds better with it installed. And there are tweaks for a lot of the image issues and other quirks of the main theme.
That being said, the ability to install these styles should be streamlined into the server I think. External extensions come and go - which would leave anyone using them dead in the water.