User blog comment:Cristina7/Introducing Discussions, a New Platform For Engaging Your Community/@comment-5275700-20160909212124/@comment-1370845-20160909223916

Hm, I'm not sure I agree. If they had waited until Discussions grew feature-wise to a state where it had reached parity, with Forums and then said "ok, now we'll replace Forums", there would've been the exact same outcry, but it would've been worse. The outcry instead would've been "wow, why didn't you warn us before taking away Forums?" This way, people are given a head's up, and told that, eventually, it'll be migrated to Discussions. The head's up obviously still freaks people out, which is fair, but by the time it seems reasonable, people will be more accepting of the idea.

Do I think that Wikia could've done more to demonstrate why Discussions could be a better feature than Forums? Sure. Perhaps show off some of the features Discussions could have. While cutting its ties to MediaWiki unfortunately means no wikitext support at the moment, it undoubtedly means less limitations on features that can be added in a less clumsy way. Showing off "killer app" features like that to make people want to move to Discussions probably would've been better.