I thought the lower boards were rouge separatists who seceded from the dorfs of the upper board, while the middle boards were some sort of Balkanized compromise between the two
There's a lot of truth to the statement, even if it isn't entirely true. On the bottom boards dorfs usually only pop up in internal memes, the odd forum game, or people putting dorf-related things in the feeling threads (e.g. RRRAGE at dorfs dying, happy at something you made in DF, WTF at how much time Toady puts into making it).
"Other games", apparently, was originally conceived as a place for B12's pre-DF, non-Curses, non-Armok games, but good luck finding any of that now. Most of the DF presence there is in comparing other indie roguelikes/building games to DF.
Curses was made to cover B12 games - in reality, LCS and all that other stuff - so it was nominally linked to DF. Then LCS became pretty much exclusively JSF's project, and now I think it's basically being crowd-dev'd.
And the original Slaves to Armok hasn't had a post since 2010, though in theory it
is DF-related.
EDIT: Just realized the acronyms going on in here: WTF, B12, DF, LCS, JSF
EDIT EDIT: But anyway, there are plenty of people who are just here for the lower-board community and not DF. Full disclosure: I, personally, haven't played DF for months now and haven't even reinstalled it since the computer's memory ded'd.