I think the new boards are great. Much easier for surf-ability.
5 seperate boards? I dunno. I guess so, yeah. Although in my personal opinion, all the LAX stuff should be on the LAX board. If you're gonna seperate out a board for LAX stuff, make it be for EVERYTHING LAX related, that way there's no confusion or cross-over. But I think the boards as they stand now are fine. During the summer there is expected to be a lot of random chatter on the Main Board, but it always tends to die down once the season starts.
I think the boards are seperated because this started out as mainly a basketball board, then evolved into a forum where people got to know eachother and wanted to chat about stuff other than basketball, and the conversation got a bit cluttered, so an off-topic board was created. Then, people on the off-topic board wanted to talk about controversial, heated stuff like politics and religion, and so another board was created to deal with that. Yes, I think it's good to have seperate boards so that people who don't care about cars or where to live in L.A. or LOST can just focus on Duke basketball (or rather, Duke sports in general) and people that just want to talk about politics have their place to go and people are generally not in eachothers' ways.
I think the level of discourse on all the boards has been excellent. I don't see any significant drop off from the SBBS days. Kudos to the mods for this.