In the World Corp storyline, Trestkon views the moderators not as reasonable authority figures who need Deus Diablo to maintain peace in Forum City but as demagogues who merely wish to keep their grasp on power and cannot accept that a force outside the PDX administration could take control from them. (Interestingly enough though, Scara does not get this treatment and is acknowledged by Trestkon to be a similarly corrupt demagogue in the World Corp storyline—just a demagogue who takes better care of his minions.)
All of the bosses you fight are still human, and fights can result in this if you carry high explosives like Vortex Grenades, LAWs and GEP Guns, as well as some of the more powerful melee weapons in combination with a high Low-Tech skill.
The final area can also be considered this, in any route (bar the hidden Narcissus end). After all you've went through in the game, the final blows are landed by simply clicking buttons. In the PDX ending you simply ban Scara (and Ryan, if you choose to) by using a terminal, and in the WorldCorp ending you at least fight Deus Diablo, but Phasmatis and King Kashue are simply killed by an orbital strike (albeit one imbued with admin powers that override their Moderator invulnerability).
Audience-Alienating Premise: It's a thrilling tale of conspiracies and power plays... on a mid-2000's internet gaming forum. Not quite the world-shattering stakes most Deus Ex fans expect.
Demonic Spiders: Hoverbots - they take less damage than normal bots (25% of normal) and deal great damage. The developers claim they will nerfed (into Glass Cannons by lowering their damage resistance to 75% of normal damage) for the first patch.
(The real) Jonas has mentioned that an unimportant NPC sometimes accidentally provoked a particular robot into killing her while the player was in a conversation about whether or not that robot is able to kill at random. This "bug" was found too funny to remove.
Before patch 1.0.1 Kashue will call Trestkon a "sick bastard" and attempt to kill Trestkon himself (as a moderator, he is immortal) if you kill anything in PDX... including fish or rats.
Scrappy Level: Shadowcode's fortress, full of traps, areas with mandatory damage (the developers admit this was bad design) and Hoverbots (see above) to be fixed in the first patch.
Unintentional Period Piece: Between the game being based in a massive user-run game-specific forum to Gamespy being the Big Bad, TNM unintentionally dated itself as a product of the mid-late Aught's.
