Just noticed that the threads are sorted the "wrong way" for me; the newest threads should be at the top, not at the bottom. The Mail Archive version is still better for me.

I personally would make new forums / subforums under talk.maemo.org and make any posts to these forums act like the mailing lists. That is, if you post to these forums, the post is added to the mailing list. Perhaps only subscribers to the mailing lists can post in these forums.

But I suspect the main reason people use the mailing lists is because it is another way to reduce the "signal to noise" ratio. The threshold to entry is higher, so fewer "newbies" use the lists to post. Just another clubhouse.