As a player who's never been reported, why aren't behavior penalties ever forgiven?

[Bixillarla]

If they were made leader of the FC due to inactiveness of the previous leader why did they not change the slogan before they were reported? They had to have known it was vulgar and could have easily changed it upon becoming the new leader. Ignoring it they are just as guilty as the person who wrote it.

[Machka]

If they were made leader of the FC due to inactiveness of the previous leader why did they not change the slogan before they were reported? They had to have known it was vulgar and could have easily changed it upon becoming the new leader. Ignoring it they are just as guilty as the person who wrote it.

Just to clarify something from the OP, according to the original account of things (linked by OP) the FC they inherited was on an alt that wasn't even on the same datacenter as the character they usually play. So it's entirely possible they simply did not know that the FC had been passed to them.

I can speak with some firsthand experience about this. In the lull before Shadowbringers, many of us had either unsubbed or simply took a break for a while, with only a handful of us logging in sporadically. Hours before servers went down for the 5.0 patch maintenance I got a ping on discord from my FC leader. Apparently at some point the past few months, their position as FC leader got passed to me due to inactivity, exactly like in the situation described by OP.

At this point I had been playing once or twice a week for over a month, and can honestly say I had absolutely no idea that I was FC leader. It wasn't until I logged in and looked at my rank that I realized I had that shiny gold emblem instead of the usual officer's one. If that could happen to me on my main while playing casually, it could just as easily have happened to someone's alt on an entirely different datacenter.