Not quite sure what you mean (or getting at) with your last sentence?
In my experience a successful forum is a very fragile balancing trick.
You can and do get forums of like minded people - tw is probably the classic. It has a core of established posters whose individuals have posted in the tens of thousands, who clearly have an intellect but is populated by an utterly boring, humourless and a pretentious point scoring group of individuals - although obviously they think of themselves as otherwise.
Anybody who is not like minded is soon hounded out.
If that is your bag then fine, there is nothing wrong in that, it is just that I prefer more out of a forum. I want to have a laugh, I want to see opposite views to mine, I want to be somewhere different from the other forums.
But that does not come easily and has a high price to pay.
In order to be different you have to take risks. You have to create an environment for people to express themselves freely. You have to except some people will not like it, some will leave, some will abuse it, some will not get it, some will feel they've been had, some will fight, some will piss take, some will be argumentative, some will thrive, some will hate it.
There are no real rules to our forum. We try to let most things go and calm things down when we can. We try to keep excessive personal abuse off the forum, we try and let grown men and women be themselves and not tell them what they can and can not do - they know that anyway.
Of course things can and do go wrong but isn't it better that we allow people to try to 'entertain' (even if it is only themselves) than stick to a comfortable formula and exclude everyone else who doesn't share the same view?
We certainly don't want to piss people off but then again we don't want to close our door to people and things new.
Maybe the Natasha era has come to an end but is that because the audience no longer wants it or the author no longer wants to act it?
I would have thought Christmas was the best of times to have a pantomime villain both in view that the audience expects one and the player of the part is the real star of the show!
The only 'character' banned from Nuts is the never endingly abusive AD account - that sort of stuff is not what we are about.
The forum is only as good as the people who post on it.
No other forum is as tolerant as ours.
We need to always to be adapting and moving on.
That's how I see things anyway.