User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Why Fandom Evolves: A Look Ahead in 2017/@comment-10370-20170112143345/@comment-20644-20170112205540

Keep in mind that Bert addressed that Discussions is currently limited and that we are continuing to work on it. That is why it has yet to replace Forum.

As for the idea to make Discussions something for mobile or make it a Forum theme, that's one of those ideas that sounds nice in theory, because it's meant to let everyone get what they want, but it's simply not practical. Here's why:


 * 1) To maintain both Discussions and Forum, even as a theme, would require more time, more people, and more money&mdash;all of which could be used to work on other parts of the site. Monobook is different right now because it's such a simple skin that requires very little upkeep. But even with its simplicity, it's not officially supported. Many features do not work in Monobook because we are not building them to work in Monobook (because that would be costly). If something breaks in Monobook, we're probably not going to fix it unless it's a critical part of using the site. I don't think anyone would want an unsupported Forum experience like that. It's better to work on one feature.
 * 2) We don't want to segment the community. We want to get to a point where everything on the site works on desktop computers as well as mobile devices, so to have Discussions be a mobile section and Forum a desktop section would lead to two different community experiences all based around the same thing (talking to other people). Of course, that might lead you to say that Discussions already feels segmented because there aren't clear links back to the wiki, but, as Bert said, that's something we're working on.

Summed up: it's a nice idea, but more options are not always the best idea in product development and site maintenance. We'll continue working on Discussions to add many of the features that people want.