I never really answered your questions directly. So here it goes.

Answer 1) Current allies are fine on Express. Just make the anti-tech-leeching change. I don't really mind if tech allies are removed, because it will benefit techers in general (less tech = price of tech will rise = bad for non-techers). D and I allies should stay because they create interesting and meaningful risk vs reward choices when landgrabbing.

Answer 2) It isn't so much that they are vague or confusing. It is that
a) Slow response time, particularly in the past. Entire resets are over by the time a mod gets to a report, and there is no recourse, this is obviously exacerbated by the pace of this server. This isn't actually a problem on Primary because it is the slowest server.
b) Extremely opaque. When someone is deleted, it isn't said why. When someone is undeleted, it isn't said why. It isn't even said who is deleted. There is a difference for being deleted because someone harassed someone else, vs running multies, but without transparency, the 2 transgressions are lumped together and treated with equal severity.
c) Multiple suggestions and discussions made in the past (which are seen/read by mods/admins), but no action was ever taken to actually improve the situation. Game changes made are always Alliance-oriented, to the detriment of solo servers.
d) No way of giving partial punishments. Sometimes an offense is not severe enough to be deleted for it, but also serious enough to be of concern. In such scenarios, mods should be able to remove land or add land to players that were wronged, or apply a -50 turn penalty, or grant 50 turns bonus or something. Right now, it is only "delete" or "no delete", making every transgression a "you cheated" or "you didn't cheat" scenario. Instead, penalties should fit the crime.