Great read, Big3. You make a lot of good points and it was really well written. I largely agree with you.
To Right-Track, I think your idea actually sounds really good and it should be easy to do as well. You could move the forums to something like
http://forums.musicbanter.com and then have a sort of blog/journal/mag thing on the front page with selected material from the editor's pick.
Even I could do it. You could just install wordpress and then those who want/are worthy can register there and get promoted to contributor status so that they can post their articles and reviews on the blog part of the site. In essence, you could keep the forum and add the music journal idea on top. Nothing much would change for those whose only wish is to stay on the forums.
As for other ideas for the future, I would like more community-minded stuff. Me, Anteater and Comus - although we're a tiny group of the users here - used to chat quite a bit outside of the forums and listen to Comus' radio show
Good times, but it's been quite a few months. Incidentally, the last version of MSN is so dysfunctional on my computer that instant messaging with it has become a pain in the arse so I'm not on much anymore at the moment. I really wish the IRC chatroom had become more popular, but it seems just a tad too technical for most.
I'm gonna see if I can come up with some more community stuff we can do on the forums, possibly some games where members make teams which compete against eachother.
edit :
I'll send a PM to Yac and ask if they can put up a wordpress blog on
http://blog.musicbanter.com or so that we can play around with.