Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24133975-20141230033116/@comment-7697305-20141230065209

As for some additional explanation: this was originally intended as a way to combat the misconception that additional user rights elevate a user above the rest of the community in some way. I probably should have thought this through more, though, as keeping admins/b-crats with colored usernames admittedly undermines this message somewhat.

At any rate, the idea was that users would still have CSS applied to the areas where their rights are relevant (ie. chatmods would still have silver pickaxes in chat, rollbackers would still have tags on the forums (due to their access to editing forum messages), admins would keep username highlights due to their rights affecting the entire site).