Gray links are undiscoverable links -- if they look disabled people may not think to hover over them, and on touchscreen displays there's no such thing as hover.
But here we're talking about administrators and oversighters who will be better versed in where links ought to be. As an oversighter I found it incredibly irritating to not be able to see easily what ordinary editors were seeing; the general principle is that having extra permissions shouldn't change what's already in the interface, just add new features.