The most visible change from vanilla hybrid, and most other IRC servers, is with relation to operators. In most IRC servers, an operator has considerable power, being able to use KILL and KLINE to remove people from the network, and possibly more. In the now aging dancer-ircu, operators were gods, able to join any channel, kick, ban, etc. This is not the case in dancer. These are the things that any operator can now do:
See the oper help, and motd
When attempting to gain a restricted mode they do not have access to, opers will be told that. Normal users will be told there is no such mode.
Show up as operators in commands like WHOIS and TRACE, if the person who invoked the command can see operators.
Be counted in LUSERS and similar commands as an oper.
That's it. No more. All other functionality has been distributed across the umodes, which can be individually granted in ircd.conf.