I fear that you may be tempted to ignore my post, because I am about to tell you that I see the forum as having pretty much all the good things we had in the D-list, with some other good things and without some bad things. However, I hope you will be willing to hear me out, because I think a lot of your problem with the forum may be a combination of prejudice and the way you're trying to interact with it.
The forum is not more hostile overall than the discussion list. I think you may be letting some rose-colored glasses get to you on that. The discussion list was occasionally aggressively hostile, and I think it was much less newbie-friendly, especially with the confusion over the modded vs unmodded lists.
Moreover, the forum can be moderated in ways that the discussion list never could. Yes, with the moderated list, we could ensure that excessively flame-y posts never got through. However, a) that was only the moderated list, b) it delayed everything, and c) it required the mods to look at every post and pass through only those worthwhile.
Furthermore, it's trivial to ignore threads you don't want to read on the forum. That was not true with the discussion list, where everything was dumped in the same bucket.
Personally, I do prefer getting everything in my email, rather than having to go out and deliberately look for new threads on the forum, and I see that as basically the only thing the forum takes away—at least, initially. However, I have it set up to send me notifications of all new threads, and all new posts on threads I'm paying attention to. Thus, all the posts that I care about come to me, and I only need to visit the forum when I want to reply. I essentially get the best of both worlds. I can only assume that this is part of why you find it a greater time sink—having to go to the forum and look for new threads. If that's the case, then I strongly urge you to make extensive use of the [Notify] buttons on sub-forums and threads, and send the notifications to a mailbox just like the D-list used to.
Overall, I am firmly convinced that the forum is the better choice, and I really wish you would expand on the problems you see with it, rather than just saying that it's a "major timesink" or that the community seems less friendly.
