Could you designate a bunch of people as mini moderators and have the majority vote of mini mods decide moderation?
Then have one moderator curate the list of mini mods. By spreading the work out, more actual time can be spent on the decision and feedback given.
r/science has something like 1500 moderators, most of which only have the power to remove comments. The rules are applied seemingly at random, and the problematic posts/titles are rarely actually fixed, they just have a sea of [removed] under them. This makes the biased posts even worse as the comments correcting them and the discussion about it disappears.
It sounds like if any of the 1500 mods dislike a comment, then that comment disappears. That's extremely biased towards removing comments.
My suggestion would have those 1500 mini mods vote "keep" or "remove" - majority wins. The main mod can look at contentious votes and override the mini mods decisions. Further the main mod can remove mini mods that are voting poorly.