I had the same situation when I did the upgrade from 7.2.2 to current.
I ended up having to create a group for the moderators, add all of the moderators to it, and set the permissions in their forum so that they could see it. As far as I am concerned it is a bug in the newer versions.
I had to do the same thing along the way with upgrades. Don't remember exactly which version it showed up in...