I have a subreddit that was once a high traffic subreddit, mainly because it was absolutely overrun with spam, bot accounts, and other nonsense. We had a lot of really great users, but they were drowned out by the noise and a lot of our best contributors were driven off by the garbage. We had very strict rules that nobody ever abided by, so a long series of complicated AutoMod rules were put in place over a number of years - we're talking about these rules starting when "old reddit" was "the reddit" - post flair didn't even exist when these rules were authored. As spammers became more persistent and AutoMod behavior changed, we kept having to tweak the existing rules and add new ones. Eventually we got to the point where we put extremely heavy restrictions on who could post in the subreddit and when. Because of that, the sub is practically dead now.

Reddit, the Moderator settings, and the tools available to us have changed drastically - It's time to completely overhaul the subreddit, and to do so we would like to shut it down completely and work on the overhaul in the background. No problem, right?

Wrong - we have to ask permission from Reddit now to take the sub private. We put in a request, it was reviewed and it was denied. We were told we weren't allowed to do what we the mod team decided was necessary with the subreddit. It was suggested that we put the subreddit in "event mode" which would last 7 days, and we could do that again to extend it another 7 days. Absolute nonsense.