I’m still convinced those saying NNTP is far superior haven’t really given the forum a shot. Try reversing things: in NNTP I have to open each message, click click click click… the previous message disappears, the new one appears. I lose context. Here, I just scroll and skim. The only complaint I’m on board with is figuring out how to deal with hierarchy. I agree with Jim that some for of indication of structure would help. But I’m not sure a simple tree structure that reinstates click click click click is the best solution. I don’t have that solution. But if people would get used to quoting the salient part of what they are replying to, that goes a long way to solving the issue.
(Man, adding that quote for context is so EASY here – in NNTP, I’d have to close the current message and go back and find the message I wanted to quote, etc, etc, pain in the ass. Easy as pie here). Now… I’m not sure what you’re seeing, but after a day of use, I go to my unread list and there’s a few lines to sift through. No problem, I’m done scanning the forum in minutes. I fail to see how this is going from the New York Times to a pile of comic books, but I guess we’re agreeing to disagree. My guess is that in a year, if the suggestion was made to go back from discourse to NNTP, people would kick and scream about all the lost functionality, it’d be like going from the internet to a pile of comic books. 
(And I noticed a glaring typo, so I just went in and edited that, rather than posting an entirely new post to the newsgroup to correct my error. This is forum vastly superior in that regard – that makes for fewer useless posts.)