I am one of those users who doesn't quite know who to support. I absolutely support the end users generating and consuming the content. There are seemingly regular examples of both, admin and mods abusing these users.

What kind of mod tools do the apps allow that Reddit does not?

I do not know if these are mod tools I would agree are necessary (e.g. bans for repeated spam) or are these tools that I would agree allow mods to abuse their power (e.g. ban users are who mere followers of other subreddits).

Frankly, I fear unofficial mod tools could lead to much worse problems if at least portions of the API are not carefully rate limited. Here I include pricing as a type of rate limiting and this could be Reddit's attempt at reeling in this abuse (even if only for IPO reasons). A particular egregious example of such an abuse would be to download all new users' history of posts to make a race determination and ban a new user because of that. Sure, a mod could do this manually using Reddit's UI, but it would remain more difficult to automate this on a large-scale.