I looked at other SE sites, and I saw that for moderating tools, one needs 10000 points, yet I noticed that we only have 4 people above that number.
Is beta going to stay in place until we get a relatively large number of users with more than 10000 points?
A few things to consider:
In addition to people who have earned moderation access through rep points, there will always be (at least) three designated moderators. Post-launch, these will be chosen by election, but for right now, we're designated by Stack Exchange staff. As it happens, none of the three of us also have 10K points, so if we launched today, there would be 7 people with that level of moderation powers.
By far, the most important and most frequently-used moderation tool is editing. Currently, anyone with over 500 rep can edit anything. Post-launch, it will be 2K, which at current rep levels includes 17 users. The "moderation tools" that you're referring to are used much less frequently and pertain mainly to analyzing what's going on on the site. If only a handful of people have access to them at first, I don't see that as so bad.
Do you currently use the moderation tools? If so, how often, and for what?
One of the criteria that SE is taking into account to determine when we launch is the number of users who've reached various rep levels. Ideally, they're looking for at least 150 users who have 200+ rep, while we currently have 78. So, though there aren't any hard and fast rules involved, we probably won't launch until our user base is significantly larger and more mature (in rep terms); as a result, the numbers of 10K+ and 2K+ users should both be significantly higher than they are now.
