In my opinion there are a few, more-or-less independent, issues discussed here. I will try to list them:

1. do we want to broaden the scope of the audience of TCS.SE?
2. do we want to broaden the topics discussed on TCS.SE?
3. do we want to broaden the level of the discussions in TCS.SE?
4. what is the real-world kind of community that we want TCS.SE to resemble most?

In my opinion, almost everybody agrees that it would be beneficial to enlarge the audience of the site, but the directions of such expansion is not unanymously agreed upon.

I share the belief that CS is not a field sharing a common language, therefore I would not like TCS.SE to accept all possible CS topics. Also, I agree that we should welcome people coming from Theory B (and I would add OR people to that).

A more controversial opinion of mine is that we should also welcome questions that are almost research-level, provided that they are clearly tagged as such (I am thinking about something similar to the soft-question tag). The reason for that comes from my opinion on point 4.

The question originates from the idea that the TCS.SE community shoud actually model the one of a CS department. My opinion is that it should instead model a conference. A bolder statement is that TCS.SE should be an ever-running whole-TCS conference with over a thousands partecipants that the real-world TCS community sometimes talks about but has never materialized.

A second motivation for such a model is that it should be a vehicle for promoting TCS to potentially interested students, by showing what academic research in a decent, friendly community (surely TCS.SE qualifies) is like. The point of allowing almost research-level question is to provide a gentle introduction to advanced TCS topics suitable to undergraduate interested students.

In my opinion there are a few, more-or-less independent, issues discussed here. I will try to list them:

1. do we want to broaden the scope of the audience of TCS.SE?
2. do we want to broaden the topics discussed on TCS.SE?
3. do we want to broaden the level of the discussions in TCS.SE?
4. what is the real-world kind of community that we want TCS.SE to resemble most?

In my opinion, almost everybody agrees that it would be beneficial to enlarge the audience of the site, but the directions of such expansion is not unanymously agreed upon.

I share the belief that CS is not a field sharing a common language, therefore I would not like TCS.SE to accept all possible CS topics. Also, I agree that we should welcome people coming from Theory B (and I would add OR people to that).

A more controversial opinion of mine is that we should also welcome questions that are almost research-level, provided that they are clearly tagged as such (I am thinking about something similar to the soft-question tag). The reason for that comes from my opinion on point 4.

The question originates from the idea that the TCS.SE community shoud actually model the one of a CS department. My opinion is that it should instead model a conference/workshop. A bolder statement is that TCS.SE should be an ever-running whole-TCS conference with over a thousands partecipants that the real-world TCS community sometimes talks about but has never materialized.

A second motivation for such a model is that it should be a vehicle for promoting TCS to potentially interested students, by showing what academic research in a decent, friendly community (surely TCS.SE qualifies) is like. The point of allowing almost research-level question is to provide a gentle introduction to advanced TCS topics suitable to undergraduate interested students.