There's a bit of a circular argument to this one. I don't tend to start threads in GD for things like cooking or books simply because I'm sure they'll fall off the front page within a day. For a niche book or a simple recipe, you simply aren't going to get pages and pages of discussion. That's not to say that it's not informative or useful, but in the environment of GD it's largely a waste of time as it'll be gone in a few days.
I suspect I'm not the only one to think this way, and I believe it leads to the perception that they're not that popular otherwise there'd be more of them. If you were to merge photography with GD there wouldn't be nearly as much discussion of photography as there currently is, simply because they would get lost in the mass of unrelated threads that is GD, and people wouldn't bother posting them in the first place.
That's why I think there should be a separate forum that doesn't necessarily just cover a specific topic (cooking, books, puzzles, etc.) but covers niche topics that aren't likely to garner many replies but are genuinely useful or informative. Perhaps a forum that the mods/admin move threads to that they think are suited to it (rather than people being able to start threads there).
So someone starts a cooking thread, mod thinks "that's useful, we should keep it" and moves it to the new forum. People can still reply to the topic but the forum doesn't get cluttered. Kinda like the archive, but active.
