Yes PieFed allows community mods to do some strange things on a per-community basis. One cool trick is to only count "subscribed" votes, which helps avoid drive-by voting from All.

Though this vote quota issue is a per-instance setting, not able to be overwritten by a community moderator.

I think Rimu is bored, not wanting to play with UI elements and wanting to jump ahead to more back-end concerns. He gets enough flack from the Lemmy community that he has to develop a thick skin to ignore all that anyway (see latest blog post prior to v1.7), though now may be too insensitive to his real supporters of PieFed.

This communication issue is the really big take-home, as it's causing people like PugJesus to quit in protest and it will work strongly against new people joining.