It boils down to having the staff for the forums, got nothing to do with costs or anything like that. People want to post but they don't want to mod. Understandable, but reorganization and consolidation happens when no one wants to mod, and particularly so when forums are slow. We simply have too many forums and staff is spread too thin.
All of the different forums have their identity and so we're just trying to figure out ways to let them keep their respective identities while also making life easier for our staff.
Imo the best compromise would be to just reorganize the three sub forums under one main forum and have staff operate across all three interchangeably. It would just be reorganized in a similar manner to the recent CEPS change, which has been a pretty helpful change. That helps clean up the forum a bit, solves the staffing issue, we don't have to meld the forums together somehow with different prefixes and everyone gets to keep their identity.
Even if we did just do a giant merger using prefixes, nothing fundamentally here is going to change honestly. The culture is what we make it really. If nsadd had the activity of eadd and posters I had known forever, I might feel strongly about its identity, but unfortunately it's a bit of a ghost town, so I can only conceive of this as a staff problem I'm not losing a beloved forum, even though it's one I've modded off and on for years now. Which ultimately lands us on the fact that 2 of the 3 regionals get no traffic, and no one wants to mod eadd. So it needs to be reorganized.