I guess, one thought that I'm ready to share now is that I don't see how someone could be for self-moderated threads but against merit-restricted threads. As in, if you resent the idea that the thread-starter should have the power to limit merit-sending, then you should really resent the idea that the thread-starter should have the power to limit discussion.
I'm going to have to disagree with you. Even Mods don't have the power to restrict Merit, but they can smite the post or even the member.Quote
If it were up to me, I think I'd get rid of the self-moderation feature completely,
When used appropriately, self-moderation is a great way to discourage spammers from even posting in your topic. Or to keep the topic short for frequent scraping.Quote
(The important change is that the "44 posts" part is now a link which will take you to a view of the deleted posts.)
Allow me to add complications 
Is the creator of the post still allowed to delete the post after this? Or edit it? It wouldn't be fair not to, but this opens up the possibility for a spammer to turn a shitpost into a good post just to make OP look bad.
I see entire topics with titles and posts, with only 1 character and nobody deletes them (I don't understand why)
In Ratimov's case, those topics are not deleted because there are still posts from other users in those topics.