As a long time follower of both this site and @codinghorror's blog, I wanted to add my peso's worth of opinion on this whole Discourse thing. I apologize in advance if anything I bring up here has been hashed out already elsewhere, but I actually find posts on Discourse to be more confusingly disorganized than with CS.
I wanted to point out to @codinghorror that your responses to the community here in regards to the things the community wants has been SpectateSwamp-ish. Not quite at that level, but not far removed either, as though you spent some time at the SwampShack and started jamming noodles together. Reading your responses basically saying your paradigm is "the One True Way" really is no different than SpectateSwamp's (albeit, yours is more eloquent and comprehensible). I'm not going to go through and locate the actual messages I'm referring to, as apparently one needs a PhD in Discourse Science and Philosophy to do anything even remotely more complex than reading on here. Infini-scroll being an obvious one, and it's great that it works for your paradigm of this community, but I would have expected you to also understand that there are other equally valid paradigms that don't share your enthusiasm for infini-scroll. Your reasonings and validations for why infini-scroll is the best way forward are great for you, but aren't necessarily valid for everyone. Further, they reek of general observations of forum communities in general, and not necessarily true of the community here.
Another topic I wanted to bring up is the anonymous postings as it impacts me directly. I dunno if something's being hashed out on that or not, because I'm not going to read through every topic to try to figure that out. While I do have an actual account on this site, due to work-place restrictions, I'm not allowed to actually login to it while at work so this fact alone would mean I will not be allowed to participate in the conversations going forward. And no, I don't use this site at home, because that's my time to escape computers altogether. Anyway, you had posted something to the effect that anonymous posting is a barrier to conversation. Again, that may be a valid general observation of general communities at large, but this site has a long history of anonymous postings that counterpoint what you are saying for this specific community. IF this were a new community being established, I would consider your point a valid point to bring up to decide not to allow it. But for this community, a well-established community, general observations about general communities is rather meaningless when there is specific observables specific to this community. It seems to me like trying to tell everyone in NYC they need to buy a car when they are satisfied with the other transportation options at their disposal because "cars are more conducive to getting you where you need to go" (BTW, I'm not saying everyone or necessarily anyone in NYC is happy with the transportation systems available to them as I don't live in nor do I know anyone living in NYC, but I imagine the thought of having to drive anywhere for anyone living in NYC is a nightmare).
Anyway, I'm rambling because I'm already at home (so I could register a new throwaway account so I could post this) and my mind isn't functioning at even 1% capacity right now.
So, TL; DR: Is Discourse the new SSDS?