Hello Fellow-Ex Coco-er :)
I will address all of your points in an orderly fashion.
The majority of servers as you said, claim to have friendly and dedicated staff. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Of course, players must join the server and interact with staff to determine if they are dedicated and friendly. Here at TheProCraft, we take pride in having enjoyable staff that lay down the law, as well as can have a good time with players.
During the posting of our server to Reddit, we had the plugins listed down vertically, but the Reddit formats appeared to have put them horizontally. Though, I think this was a rhetorical question.
No cheating. If you continued reading to the next sentence you would see, "This includes hacked clients, cheaty texture packs, x-ray, abusing glitches, etc". Also, awesome reference to "Will I get banned for mentioning I am going to bed, is that considered advertising?"
The staff has the final say because as I'm sure you know fellow-ex Coco-er, a lot of times players argue with staff over something that is clear. For example, the staff has Core Inspect records of the player griefing, and they fight tooth and nail that they did not. All common sense and logic points to that they did grief, and that they should be punished accordingly. We fight to hold equality in punishment and fairness when a rule appears to be broken.
There is a small handful of Coco-er players online, that were and are close friends with the owner and a server admin. None of which, were contacted in your server to get them on. This may be surprising to you, but when people are friends with others, they have contact with them outside of where they may of met them. The majority of our players have come from voting sites that we have put our server on.
TheProCraft is not a near identical copy of the server you mention. One large difference is the use of Towny while your server uses Grief Prevention Golden Shovels. Did you know that the plugins on Spigot/Bukkit are for the public, and surprisingly so, servers use the plugins. The similarities of our servers come down to that we both use Essentials and Core Protect.
Both owners of the server have put in a decent amount of money and a lot of time into getting the server running. This is not the first time we have tried to make the server a success, which means we have put money into something that did nothing but take our money. As we are both students, money is tight and we would like to be able to keep the server running (purchase more RAM etc). Builder as one might expect is a staff rank, for the use of creative in all worlds. They are trusted with creative to help us with server builds or player builds. The rank of Moderator is there for anyone who is so inclined to purchase the rank. We do not expect anyone to, we just want that to be an option for our players. They would be held fully responsible as any other moderator would be. Co-Owner was for sale as an investment, also as a very very long shot. The odds of someone buying co-owner is about %0.0001.
We are advertised as a Survival server, and all players get all the opportunities (donating or not) to play survival like everyone else. The builder rank, as I mentioned before, is a staff rank. And if a player is so inclined to purchase a staff rank, they may. If you still see this as a problem, I'd like to announce here for the first time that we will be creating a creative world very soon for all players (Builder or not).
We are not all about the money here, but as you know, the world runs on money. To keep the server up, we have to be able to pay for it. And as I mentioned earlier, both of the owners are students and have limited funds. We created TheProCraft to play Minecraft with friends and to make new friends.
I am sorry to hear you will not be joining TheProCraft, we would have loved to have you.