As several people have pointed out, the problem is high barrier to good posters, like Yvain. For various reasons either practical or emotional or whatever they don’t post anymore. However, many of the quality Commenters, as opposed to “posters” hang on. Removing Open Threads won’t do anything to get people to write interesting Posts, unless you think there are a lot of open thread comments that should be posts. It will just reduce opportunities for quality commenters to talk to each other.
As several people have pointed out, the problem is high barrier to good posters, like Yvain. For various reasons either practical or emotional or whatever they don’t post anymore. However, many of the quality Commenters, as opposed to “posters” hang on. Removing Open Threads won’t do anything to get people to write interesting Posts, unless you think there are a lot of open thread comments that should be posts. It will just reduce opportunities for quality commenters to talk to each other.