Yeah. Having seperate "elite rationality club" and "casual rationality discussion" areas is probably my prefered solution.

If that happened, unless it was very carefully presented, I would expect a drop of quality in the discussion section because "hey cool down man we aren't in the restricted section here", and because many old-timers might stop spending time there altogether.

I would rather see a solution that didn't include such a neat division; where lower standards were treated as the exception (like in HPMoR threads and open threads), not the rule.