Related to the programming of the website... yeah, that tends to be hopeless. Best luck I've had in the past with getting things changed was from making the exploit known so that users here would abuse it. Once abused too harshly they end up feeling like they don't have a choice in the matter. It's how we got autoplay videos to be stopped and quite a few glitches to be patched up.
The only stuff I've had accomplished with topics were related to deciding where the line ought to be drawn for things like what is/isn't spam. I don't really have that much power over the site beyond banning and topic deletion.
"I don't really have that much power over the site beyond banning and topic deletion."
So you are basically just a moderator who does the dirty work.
This site saves IP logs after every login, doesn't it? Oh and you would definitely get more traffic if this place wouldn't require Javascript.