I don't feel that I've personally been treated unfairly by moderation but I do feel compelled to say something on behalf of many posters here who probably do not have much forum-going experience outside of JWN.
I have, however, lost dozens of posts that were made in threads that were deleted for unknown reasons. I don't know what threads they were or what I said in them or how long I spent saying it (some of my posts take 30-60 minutes to write). I only know something happened when my total post count goes below my last post number or I see my "Topics Posted On" list shrink -- but I have no way to know what disappeared from that list, which is 106 pages long currently. So that's an example of a practical concern of mine.
It comes down to trust. You have to trust the people running any site that they are doing the best they can for the right reasons. If you don't then you really should just leave and find someplace you do.
So basically we just have to trust an unknown group of people to have our best interests at heart? It's hard to trust people we don't know, who take actions that are not documented publicly. One cannot even see if someone is banned or for what reasons they were banned. I hope that you at least have a backend way of seeing what your mods are doing.
I'm not intending to sound disgruntled over all this, but I'm not sure what I think of the response that 'People have a problem with authority after their Watchtower experience, so the way to deal with their questioning of our actions is shadow moderation, so nobody knows who to argue with'.