Only Toady can sticky posts. Deon simply askes for it to be stickied in his board, as did I. The sticky carried over after he moved it, but deon didnt even notice it, until I posted about this behaviour in his thread. I dont know if you have seen the post or not.
I too found it odd that ha moved it to releases giving the reason that it was not getting much attention. I think it wasnt because of his board, but because of two reasons: its a total conversion, which is something not everyone likes; and because MDF has become something akin to a black hole when it comes to the attention of the causal mod-user.
It appaers as if many people say: I want to try mods, start MDF, try it, either like it and stay; or dislike it and move back to vanilla DF. This was never my attention and I have no idea how to change that behaviour. All I can say is that I wouldnt blame the board structure. I agree that the deon/putnam boards are ... not that useful (?) Putnam, you yourself said it about your board and moved thongs into the utility sectiob, because it seemed more fitting; and deon did something alike now with the LotR mod. I feel really bad about this, but if you look at the amount of topics in the boards, its still only your release threads.
I would like to propose a new mod list, one thread that gives a lot of info about them, with screenshots and everything. People wont get interested in Lfr or EA, if they dont know about it. MDF itself is only so popular because of reddit and fb and because players and stories raise the interest in non-players. Putnam started with a good idea and did mod-introfuctions on reddit, and I think a Lfr succession fort would show that it exists outside of the modding forum.
If this ends with theclosure of the sub-boards (and I really like the system of releases and utilities etc), all I can do is outsource and make my own website/forum, because there is no way I can compress all things MDF into one thread.
I'm sorry that this touches you so much, I remember your issues with the changes when it started.
PS: all funny typing is because of the ebookreader I type on.
PPS: maybe a minor/major mods board, with one sticky thread each, which lists all of them with more info than Prophets list. (?)