Jeff:
Oh, I sometimes feel this way -- I mainly wish some folks who posted in the past would do so more often now.
But like a lot of things in life, we see what we want to see, and perhaps you're seeing a lot of the forest and not looking for some really wonderful trees in there.
To me, the most valuable part of the discussion board -- by far -- are the photo threads posted by contributers here, who continue to amaze me with their travels and interests in golf architecture. Just in the past month, we've seen threads on Harbor Shores in Michigan (Nicklaus), Worplesdan, Hackensack (Banks), Blue Mound (Raynor), and Moraine (Campbell), plus revitilization of threads brought back from folks who have recently played courses, such as Camargo and Culver Academies, plus a bunch of others I haven't mentioned. (Just yesterday, someone posted a great photo thread on a course not far from where I live, one I'd never heard of by an architect I've heard little of -- and it looks really interesting. Isn't that what this site is best at doing?) And sitting on the front page right now is probably the definitive thread on Sand Hills, full of incredible pictures, and despite some pissing and moaning in the middle of the thread, a lot of lively discussion about this course, in the tradition of the kind of vigorous debate that I think Ran envisioned.
Sure, Tiger gets his share of thread mentions (and I'll take my share of the credit/blame for these) -- he's the biggest story in golf right now, and to expect a bunch of golf nuts not to comment on golf's most famous golfer seems unrealistic. Besides, the Tiger threads are obviously marked that way, and easily avoided.
I think it was Shivas who said it best a while back -- despite all the bickering and back-and-forthing here, GCA remains by far the best website around for discussion and debate about golf architecture. I learn something nearly every day.