A split hurts both sites in a big way (anyone here ever been involved in a OSS project forking to death?), so i'd prefer avoid that (which may or may not be possible). I know and like a lot of people here and losing half of them (either way) and their opinions would hurt both future sites, not to mention the silent readers that may wander back to ES or HR.
As far as what i liked, I like the power polls, I like the cap sheets, I like most of the people, I like the clean look and ease of use.
What could be changed:
-Link news articles to forum threads (like blogs do, the article post remains like they are currently, with a "Discuss this Article" link which can reduce some forum spam without affecting the time ordered display of the newswire. Multiple articles on the same subject can all be displayed individually in the newswire and link to a single discusion thread. The latest article can just be automerged as the next discussion post when they're added to the newswire.) Newswire pieces wouldn't show up in the discussion forum unless comments were posted.
-Stat breakdowns and essay would be nice. We already have some (the @comcast guy who's name i forget), but sometimes I end up writing huge breakdowns of available players or our draft picks and their trade value and they end up as post #48 in some long random thread, so no one sees them and i have to repeat the info over and over and over again
)
Like the newswire, having these link to discussion threads would also be extremely useful. that way the latest articles stay on top in the article database/listings, but can be discussed freely in the forums in a somewhat focused thread.