Summary of this thread so far: "Anecdote!" "Yeah, well I don't believe your anecdote because anecdote!"
@pie_flavor, I actually have no trouble believing that Discourse works fine for you on a forum with 7.1k topics, 122k posts, and 10.5k users. Admins have posted our dashboard stats before, I can't find them at the moment (maybe we can get an update?), but I seem to recall our numbers being somewhat greater than that. Discourse did not scale gracefully for us at the time we were using it. I suspect a lot of the technical problems we saw and you do not stem from that difference.
Moreover, Discourse is probably easy to get used to if you start with it as your first platform (as a number of other communities have, and I'm sure they're perfectly happy with it). We were migrating from another platform and we expected similar functionality; instead, we were faced with many changes we didn't expect. Maybe we should have, given the age of CS, but there was not adequate preparation for the transition and it was not handled by the community leaders we know and trust. It was handled by an outside figure who appeared to be trying to shove a mandatory paradigm shift down everyone's throats. We didn't understand why the reins appeared to have been handed over to someone new, we felt betrayed, and this feeling was only made worse when the new member started moderating our community rather than providing platform support.
When we asked for things we were used to like pagination, we were told it's never going to happen. These things will never even be an option because they don't fit in with the "vision" for the platform. If we asked for them here, we got disparaging replies, if we asked for them on Meta, we got banned. It didn't feel like a community anymore because no one seemed to have a voice in its direction. When I look at those old threads about Discourse, I see a lot of members who eventually got so frustrated they left. That makes me really sad.
I don't think anyone's claiming NodeBB is sunshine and rainbows. It has bugs, including some freaking annoying ones. But WTDWTF fits within this development community, it seems to have a voice, and bugs are actually getting fixed. I said earlier that Discourse didn't scale well at the time we were using it. It's (theoretically) possible every technical problem with Discourse has been fixed by now. If so, we still wouldn't use it. The sociological problems are still there; our community is still as bad a fit for theirs as theirs is for us.
So if you have problems with NodeBB, you should say so; it's possible this may result in them being fixed given the cooperation between development communities I noted above. If you think it's slow, you can try to help us find the bottlenecks. If you want to, you can even call NodeBB trash software, call its developers lazy... we've seen that all before. But if you compare it to Discourse at every opportunity, you should not be surprised if people lash out, engage in "name-calling" as you referred to it earlier, etc... because all you're doing is bringing up bad memories of conflict within our community.
Just my two cents.