However, I believe others in this forum should remain vigilant. Democracy falls when the citizens give up their power, and analogously I believe that unless we, as forum users, speak out against censorship, the admins in charge will eventually control the opinions on this forum.
In accordance with that ideology, I maintain my public stance that Bitcoin Foundation should be moved out of Bitcoin Discussion. However, I will refrain from arguing more about this issue.
What you and many others here fail to understand is this not a democracy and this does not belong to the people. This is a private forum hosted in the Internet. This is not a public domain neither a free speech zone. Because of this fact, complaints regarding the censorship or sponsorship practiced by the administrators and moderators are useless. The Bitcointalk forum is entitled to support or to suppress whatever the administrators and owners decide, not what the "vigilant" users decide.
The "power" here belongs to the administrators and the owners, not to the users.
What you said is an underlying truth of the Forum, and it needs to be highlighted. I don't think enough people realize this when they first wade into bitcoin. The .org domain hints at something non-profit, and now the new "Foundation" hints at something pure, but in reality, there nothing in the bitcoin world is non-profit. Bitcoin developers want to be paid, this may not be the advertised or an acknowledged fact. Forum moderators spend time here because they see an opportunity to make money. I personally did not recognize the extant of hidden conflict of interests until the GLSBE/goat issues exposed some of the links. I now assume that there are far more interconnections and undisclosed reasons to bend a message one way or another by moderators AND foundation members.
What new users fail to realize, is pseudo conflict of interest policy that I had assumed exists is really just a self-policing policy. But it appears that when the sum is large enough, rules are bent, favors given, changes are made - you know stuff that if it occurred in the real-world we would cry "not fair", and regular folks would expect someone to step in and fix it. Some folks have called out "not fair", "biased" etc, but no one is taking this seriously enough to actually address in an organized way. My theory is that because everyone is involved in the profit side right now, it looks like these "not fair" calls will be ignored and torn down in seemingly logic arguments.