To continue the chain, did you consider using Librelist? Zed seems to be mad at Groups for similar (but not identical, his reasons were short whereas yours were long and detailed) reasons. Do you feel forums tend to be better than mailing lists for these kinds of discussions? I've been considering the question lately, as I used to be a _huge_ fan of forums, but have moved away from them as of late.
Librelist has no user interface to speak of - at least with Google Groups it was possible for some users to post from the web. A critical reason for our move was being able to make it easier for people to ask questions and get answers - thus a simple and easy-to-use web interface is critical to that.
This kind of sparks with that whole "developer email client" thing I was talking about in another thread. Forums are in HTML and HTML is about formatting for reading. As most know, code has different reading standards than legible text, making forums a really poor choice for code talk.
I really wish there were a new standard of markup for code highlighting through email.
