Sorry, you ended your last post indicating I might not have been clear so I was making sure.
I don’t really think I’m going out on that far of a limb making the conclusion that a more standard discussion forum like Discourse has much wider potential and a lower bar for sustenance as a community than a StackExchange site.
StackExchange has two things going against it that Discourse does not: First, is narrower in purpose. It’s built to be able to ask direct questions to a community at large and hopefully receive a timely, verified answer. The number of websites or communities that would see a StackExchange instance as being something useful to them is small.
Second, the ingrediants required for a StackExchange site to prosper include a topic that guarantees the continued need to ask questions (and require human responses rather than google searching), and enough people that are knowledgable on the subject and invested enough to share what they know. If everything worth covering has been covered, activity dies. If there isn’t enough variety in the userbase to have an answer for the full range of questions, then activity dies. If nobody has anything worth asking, then users aren’t going to stick around and monitor for questions they can answer.
Meanwhile, Discourse as a discussion forum has much broader use. Just from my own vantage point in this corner of the internet, I could rattle off an endless number of gaming groups, webcomics, dev teams, podcasts, support groups, sports clubs, etc. that have use for Discourse that would never dream of bothering with a StackExchange system. There are forums with 10-15 people on them that have been alive for a decade, for them the system is serving its purpose. I can’t think of a situation where a userbase that small would get the desired output of StackExchange.
That’s why I think your concern about the hurdle of building up to critical mass in order for Discourse to be useful is misplaced. I believe that this new project will serve the needs of far more customers, and those customers will have to work a lot less in order to see that effort result in something sustainable.