Quick mod is just a single checkbox, so it doesn't take space and even if I never really use it, it's still okay to have the checkbox in there...
Actually you'd be surprised in how many places that checkbox turns up, it's more than I realised (display, message index, search, unread/unreadreplies)
Yeah, that sounds quite odd to me.. Then again, if it's just for people with moderation powers, it's bearable...
That's the point, it isn't. Search is outside of boards, so stuff like lock/pin/etc aren't loaded, so there's no way to know (except for checking global moderator, perhaps) whether or not the user would have these powers, so the query has to be run either way.
The only saving grace is that, by default, the quick moderation is off, so only 3 queries get issued by default, not 11. But I've rewritten boardsAllowedTo by now so that if it receives a single string, it returns a simple array of boards, but if it gets an array, it returns an array (key = permission, value = array of boards where that permission is granted), and it looks like on searching the source that this won't be a problem to do it differently.