I could be wrong, but I think the original decision for this (a long, long time ago) was because most mailing list discussion (a lot less than what goes on in these forums, regardless of the domain name) was dev-to-dev about actual subjects that were impacting application development for Maemo. On the flip side, most of the discussion that was/is going on here is social and impertinent to ongoing application development.

Now that everything is combined -- and the mailing list will soon be integrated here -- this subject should definitely be re-approached. It has nothing to do with the forums being "lesser" than the mailing lists, only that a lot more posts happen here than there -- making the Karma weights disproportional.

Tim