So, did everyone here get their Note 2 from the local telcos, or are there better deals to be found elsewhere in the world?

I think you underestimate the power of the community in moderating the forum. We have over 100K posts a week. On the other hand, on a daily basis we total over 1M views of the forum. The magnitude of the numbers greatly favor the community moderating itself. It's just not possible for all these posts to be scrutinized by a panel of selected people (and out of that, only a small core group are addictively active).

Some of the reasons that moderators are still around is because they are entrusted to take action, and to step in as The Authority in the middle of a dispute.

It is not the same to point out a problem as compared to reporting it. When you post a reply, it's a post. Getting it acted on requires a moderator chancing on the post and having the interest and time to take care of it. Whereas when you report a post, it goes through our report handling workflow. It is an actual queue that all moderators can see and act upon.