What I would find most helpful is if you don’t put more effort into structuring the category (how-to) as such, but rather give a better structure to the Docs.
I really appreciate if the forum is just fluid for users to post. I think for that it’s central you have good top level categories and users post in the right one of these. But when sub-categories get complex, when it becomes important for users to post in the right sub-category or in which sub-category to look for stuff, I find that somewhat disruptive.
Right now you practically just mirror the forum set-up on the docs:
Why not have staff use some staff-only tags to curate and structure the docs, like ‘docs-getting-started’, ‘docs-setup’ - with content from anywhere on the forum? Then you could set up a Docs page that is more than just a mirror of the forum, but has a properly curated table of contents, like:
Docs
+Getting Started
+Setup
+Advanced Setup
+Contributing
+Configuring
+Advanced Configuring