Splitting up developer / user is a fine idea, and there is already garage.maemo.org and the developer mailing list so I think that split has / could easily be achieved. Perhaps the split is user vs. power user?

Also, I agree that the search is really terrible, even with advanced search.

For questions like "which software does X" or "how do I ..." , I suggest a "yahoo answers" or "stack overflow" format instead of a message board. Many threads tend to veer way off course which seems to be why we get 500 post threads, and good luck trying to enforce otherwise.