After reading through the relevant threads from Friday, last night, and today, I think this experiment has revealed a fundamental misunderstanding between a good potion of the membership and the Admins/Prominent Members™, about what this forum is and who it serves, and that these two groups are talking right past each other.
There's a large portion of the community whose primary interaction with the forum is through EtcetEra and maybe a couple of OT threads. These members view EtcetEra as its own community. These are the folks complaining about the forum split, having to go past a bunch of OTs to get to the content they care about, and ultimately putting a bunch of people on ignore so they can interact with their actual community again.
On the other side are the admins, who through all of their posts repeatedly state that they consider OTs to be the foundation of the forum and they tie the health of these OTs to the overall health of the forums, so they're taking actions to promote these OTs. In this instance, the action they took ran right into a large faction of users who don't see things the same way.
And the most frustrating thing to me as I read all of these posts is that a lot of people aren't picking up what the Admins are putting down: that the OTs are the thing that take precedence, and that the Admins either aren't aware of, or are dismissive of, the community that has coalesced around EtcetEra.
Which is fair -- they pay for the maintenance and upkeep of it, so they get to decide what their forum is and who it serves. I would just counsel that a community isn't static, and that it begins changing and transforming after the events that led to its creation, so perhaps recognizing that fact and trying to understand it might actually go a long way toward promoting a healthy & vibrant forum. After all, you inherited this community from somewhere else, and that community can just as easily decide to move on from here.
