When I joined, the thread list would fit on one page. We didn’t have The Quarantine Zone, Politics & Elections, The Game Room, Thread Games (which seems a little redundant), or Marketplace. I’m not entirely sure, but we may have not even had Cafe [sic] Society. On my browser, The BBQ Pit is on the third page when I page down. The contents page seems bloated to me already. Besides, you can always start a Breaking News thread in MPSIMS.
Otherwise “Cafe Society” would only be for threads about cafes.
At first glance it does, in terms of naming, but it’s very necessary in function. Otherwise, The Game Room would be absolutely dominated by the thread-based games in the dedicated category. (Compare the two, and Thread Games is much more active than Game Room, with many threads getting updates with ten times the activity of anything in Game Room.)
While you could resolve that by having everything in one forum, and making sure all of the thread games have their own tag and giving people the option to mute that tag if (like me) those threads are distracting and annoying, it still seems warranted to separate them (and that separation predates the move to Discourse anyway; we didn’t have tags back then).
And a callback to our origin at AOL, where we had – IIRC – two threads: one for Cecil’s column and one for MPSIMS.
Which makes sense in the context of the traditional reverence for The Perfect Master’s writings: everything else is mundane and pointless in comparison.