Regarding disruptors, if there are clear rules about what is acceptable on -dev, one can simply moderate out offenders. It's absolutely necessary we have a forum where we can share and discuss purely academic and technical matters. No-one can accuse censorship because all moderation would say would be to "take it to the other list". It's essential for all people who are developing and maintaining Bitcoin protocol software, or services that rely on it. The mailing list used to be very low volume.

While we are at it, we should also think about a bitcoin-announce read only list which consumers of Bitcoin Core can subscribe for announcements about new versions of Bitcoin Core, and any critical warnings. Miners and service providers would particularly benefit from this. The list is moderated so only say Bitcoin Core commit engineers are allowed to post. 

 

The potential downside is too much separation becomes confusing although I would not oppose such a change. My own suggestion would be try just a -dev and -discuss list and see how that goes first. It used to work well. Whatever the case I am very confident we need a general discussion mailing list.