I feel like I've written this post at least a half-dozen times in the past, but here goes anyhow.
First, I don't have any problem at all with non-gun threads or even non-gun sections. I don't personally have a goal to keep the forum gun-oriented; guns are what bring us all together, but we also have other facets of our lives, and we enjoy and benefit from discussing them. So I have absolutely no objection from that standpoint.
Let me shift the convo for a second. I've been preaching "view unread posts" for a long time now, trying to get people converted so they don't just go read the forum section-by-section. Do you know how many people still view section-by-section? Do you? I dunno, but I still hear a lot of people say things like, "Oh, I had no idea that you had a cleanup at Greenwater, i wish I had known!". So WHY didn't they know about the cleanup? Because they never look at the "Other Events" section, and they read section-by-section. Therefore, they miss EVERYTHING in any section they don't browse.
Back when we had separate WTB sections, how many times did you see people post WTB ads in the WTS section? And then when we move their thread, they bitch: "Fuck, don't put it in the WTB section, nobody reads that!".
OK, now let's talk about DIY threads. So let's say some poor fucker rips open his shower valve thinking he's going to wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am replace the shower valve, and then realizes he's in over his head and he can't turn the water on in his house anymore, and he's basically fucked, legally speaking.
What's this poor schmuck to do? Let's look at a couple of options:
1) Make a thread in General Discussion, get a lot of good input from folks that know this stuff, and solve the problem; or
2) Make a thread in the DIY section, which gets half the traffic, and hope that he gets the right people to comment.
See my point?
A separate section is nice if you're searching for an existing thread, but as far as encouraging participation in threads it actually HURTS you.
My vision for the site is that that it will have fewer forums, not more, for exactly these reasons.