Seems to me that if you do not want aggressive mods yelling at everyone for misposts, the only option left is a board taht already covers all the bases.
As seems clear from the war discussion, it was impossible to separate news from discussion.
I agree it would be nice to have a place just for current events articles (not op-eds, just news), and for all discussion to be elsewhere. But if the mods won't do that (and why should they?), it seems like it makes sense just to combine them.
Agav, it gets news entirely out of JS (and randomly GD), which is a plus, especially to Netfree users.