Probably had something to do with that the designer didn’t know how TMF boards worked and how people used them. I think that the underlying philosophy of Discourse is for broad range of categories which have categories that are frequent created and discussions that are shallow (few replies).
TMF kinda messed up when they carried over people’s (non-stock) favorite boards to the new “Categories” but didn’t carry over people’s STOCK/company favorites but left it for the users to figure out that they needed to add “Companies A-Z” and then tag the stocks that were n their favorites.
It’s almost like TMF made the decisions without having the slightest idea how people used the old boards.
In my job, we used to call this “make the users work for the ease of the system, rather than make the system work for the user.” Yeah, that always resulted in the users bailing.