I have a bit of a different perspective. For those not in the know I left the site back in September 09 for my own reasons, and have only returned this past week. When I left the site’s questions were all grouped together. Having come back to see them fragmented, I love it! In my mind there always needs to be a division between the site and meta issues simply because only a small subset of users care enough about the community to read and reply to these types of questions, so removing them from the general pool of questions as well as those questions’ guidelines, is advantageous in facilitating frank and honest discussion about the site with the people who care most about it.
The division between social and regular to-the-point questions is interesting. I’m not sure if I like it or dislike it, but I think I’m on the side of liking it, because it lays out what kinds of answers are preferred and allows people to better moderate themselves in accordance.
The site I originated from, Metafilter, has its own question subsection, Ask Metafilter. Over time they chose to focus only on questions with answers, social chatty questions are discouraged and in fact not really allowed. This has caused the community to take on a different flavour, especially considering that some of the most popular questions would qualify today as being chatty and would have been deleted, but weren’t because the guidelines were not as stringent back then. I do wish they would implement a more chatty question section, because it is fun to chat with people and to learn about them. And this issue arises often in MetaTalk (their divided site-talk section).
Having returned almost a year later, I prefer the way the place acts now compared to how the place was before. But I think that is because I have always preferred answering question to making friends (while it is nice and I love you all, it’s not really why I joined the site). That said, it does feel different now. I liked the older threads where it was a balance of the both but I really disliked it when the chatty aspects dominated and changed the direction of the question. Now the site feels more dedicated to its purpose of answering questions, while also letting people who enjoy chattyness do so in the social section. In this regard it does also seem as if the site is more aimed to welcoming new users rather than fostering the relationships with current users, which is an admirable goal in a company looking towards the future but which will inevitably cause discontent amongst some folks who enjoyed it the way it was before.