Some of the folks who have been around for a long time and have participated during that time could tell you how things were in the past, better than I can. As you can see, I've made fewer than 270 comments in 15 years, with many of them being in the past few years, if I remember correctly. From 2009 till a couple of years ago I mostly popped in for a look every few months, but had little to say.
My recollection is that until recently, making comments about the church that were negative in any way was frowned upon, and so some of the conversations that you are seeing would probably have been quite different. As with many other things, I am open to correction about that. Calm, is my recollection reasonably accurate?
Maybe Calm, California Boy, smac, or others with high comment counts would like to give you some history of the forum.