So far we haven't even got a separate subreddit for meetups, which should be uncontroversial, although I hear it is under development. Despite the simplicity of this proposed change, apparently the codebase makes it difficult.
This is darkly hilarious to me; adding a new posting board should be trivial, with no coding required at all. If I may go old-fart for a moment, it's yet another way that modern tech has still failed to match old tech that's fallen out of use over trivial inconveniences.
LW is a fork of the Reddit codebase, where making new boards is indeed trivial. I haven't looked into it myself, but unless the original developers shot themselves in the foot rather badly with their design, it shouldn't be tricky here either.
I suspect the real problem isn't technical difficulty but inability to book any developer time at all.
There are various people who feel that Lesswrong degraded in the last year. In the same timeframe more and more discussions moved into the open thread model and open threads became weekly instead of monthly.
I suggest to counteract that trend by opening all discussions per default on Discussion instead of opening them in weekly open threads. Having the topics in discussion makes it easy to browse the list of topics and choose the headline that are of interest, even if the thread got opened two weeks ago.