How long are you allowed to hold an HT channel?

I'm writing this post in hopes of getting a discussion going and eventually a clarification from staff on the rules for holding HT channels. Recently, I've seen 2 situations in which staff intervened with channel-holding. By holding an HT channel, I'm referring to the act of bringing a character or group of characters into HT and not summoning immediately, or in some cases, not summoning at all and waiting out the 2 hour timer.

In this post, I'll recount the two situations I know of where GMs intervened in channel-holding, explain more why I decided to write this post, and state my opinion on this matter.

Situation 1: a friend of mine used a mule to hold an HT channel. After around 75 minutes of holding, a GM saw and banned them for this for 3 days on multiple characters. The ban was later appealed and the appeal was accepted, but the player was given a formal warning for this.

Situation 2: a friend of mine was hosting a 10-man run. They found a free channel, went inside, but once inside realized one of their runners had not signed up, so they needed to exit and redo the sign ups. Before leaving, they were discussing how they should set up the two parties and organizing the runners. They were in there <5 minutes when a GM showed up and told them they had to leave. The host was then sent to GM jail, and as a result could not secure the channel after leaving and lost it to another group.

My opinion and arguments:

I think there's a point where holding an HT channel could possibly be considered griefing, like in Situation 1, but I don't think it's banworthy so I think unbanning the player and giving them a formal warning was the right move. However I don't see how Situation 2 is considered griefing. It takes an annoying amount of organization to plan a 10-man HT, and if they're in there for 5 minutes without summoning, I think it's pretty clear they're planning on HTing but still ironing out the details of a 10-man run.

I think there are several situations in which someone would want to hold an HT channel for 5-10 minutes, such as the group in Situation 2. Here's another example, which actually happened to me today, where my party went into HT and waited 7 minutes before summoning.

There was a group trying to snipe my channel after our first run, but we managed to claim the sign-up after our last character left the HT map. However the sign-up has a 5 minute timer, after which it expires and then anyone is free to start a sign up. My group usually takes a 10 minute break between runs, while keeping the sign-up every 5 minutes. But we felt that since the group trying to snipe wasn't leaving, it was safer to just enter the run immediately to secure our channel, then take our break inside HT before summoning.

I understand that staff has a right to ban you or remove you from a map at their own discretion and I'm okay with that, because it's impossible to make the T&C cover everything. But I feel like these situations are starting to become unfair, and part of this might stem from my frustration of seeing so many people get banned lately for seemingly small things and without warning. So, I would like to bring light to this topic and see what other people think, as well as implore the staff for a statement on what's allowed, what's not, and what the associated punishment is.