Great post, Coach!
You really seem to understand the reasons behind a lot of things here.
What most people don't realize is that CZ is not my vision or the staff's vision of how a site should be run. It's an evolution over 15+ years from many staff members and users as well as a lot of user feedback and usage patterns
A lot of people think of the Fan Zone as CowboysZone, but there is a reason why there are more forums and why we strive to keep each forum focused on its own purpose rather than letting forums get saturated with all types of threads and posts.
For example, we work hard to keep the Fan Zone focused on Cowboys current news and information while allowing some new types of topics and discussions to be posted as well. The reason we do this is because a lot of users come to the site either at work or simply for one goal and that is to quickly see if anything new or interesting has happened with the Cowboys today. Those users do not care about yet another fan's opinion on why some player or coach sucks, they just want to read about current Cowboys news and fan reactions to that news.
There are also a lot of users here that have more free time or at least spend more time on the site and are interested both in Cowboys news and information as well as many of those rehashed discussions. Of course some users just like to debate and some users like to bash the players, coaches, etc. they hate.
Then we have forums like the Off-topic Zone where a lot of users spend their time talking about a lot of random things or just chit-chatting back and forth.
What we have always tried to do on CZ is provide a place for all of those types of users.
While some users get mad that we move a thread to the other forums they fail to understand that in the past, we would have likely just deleted the thread instead. Some users may see a moved thread as a negative, but we see it as a way to get it more exposure for the users who are most interested in those types of threads.