Hi all. I'm the mysterious Discourse employee who got in touch with the Godot team.
I reached out because I saw that this forum was shutting down, which was a crying shame. While I do of course have a bias towards Discourse I'm just a huge fanboy of forums in general because of the way they open up, store and disseminate information. I'm doing a part-part-time project together with a Godot developer so I have a tiny personal stake in this community. I really didn't like the prospect of this forum leaving behind a vacuum that mostly chat-based communities would come to fill up, as I feel very strongly that chat and forum discussions are two completely different modes of discussion and should be treated as complementary rather than in opposition with one another.
So the tl;dr of it all is: So long as this forum community remains up and running in a sustainable manner (no one is sacrificing their rent money to keep it up) I'm not gonna push for a move. I'll address the debate above for posterity's sake.
Maintenance
It's not really a matter of knowing the programming language or framework that a platform is built on. I've administrated forum communities running on SMF, bbPress, BuddyPress, VBulletin, Discuz! and more, and I'm not a programmer. What it comes down to is the user friendliness of updates, plugins, themes and other future-friendly customisations. The vast majority of communities (just like websites, i.e. WordPress) are by and large not maintained by developers but rather by community managers with varying degrees of technical savvy. Developers are only brought in when sh** breaks.
Plugins
To be clear, the free hosting that I'm offering is on the Standard plan of Discourse.org, which doesn't allow custom plugins. The default bundle of plugins we include seem to suffice for hundreds of open source communities we're already hosting.
Projects without web developers or budgets that can't be dedicated to keeping custom plugins up to date really shouldn't get involved with them in the first place. The technical debt builds up, and before you know it you have a broken feature with lots of users and no one around to fix it. Or, worse yet, a security hole.
I was part of the core team behind jMonkeyEngine and its community for half a decade, and every time we ventured into a non-trivial development project that wasn't part of our core competence as an engineering team (Game engine development) it came back to haunt us 6-24 months later, without fail.
Patreon
One major feature I think Discourse has going for it in the context of hosting the Godot community is our Patreon integration. Just like Discord (yes, a lot of people get our two products mixed up), Discourse helps raise awareness of a project's Patreon campaign which in turn brings in more patrons.
Godot Q&A
I don't think the Godot community is well served by having https://godotengine.org/qa/ and https://godotdevelopers.org/forum/ co-existing. Looking at the Q&A board, the vast majority of questions that have received any reply at all have just a single reply (and a helpful one at that!). There aren't really answers competing for prominence, which makes up/down voting a redundant feature. The Godot community would be much better off with a single forum platform to crowdsource their knowledge base.
If merging the Q&A site into this forum is a possibility, I strongly suggest you pursue it. In the case of being hosted on Discourse, this is something we could assist with. We don't normally do this type of thing for free but we make exceptions for projects that we are big fans of and/or would be a good story for our brand.
