You do realize that they made an entire site for CodeGolf that is reasonably active (and has its own culture... and lead to the creation of specialized languages for it... and even pushed the bounds of OEIS a few times - https://codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5318)?
I am fully aware that it's split off. My entire point of mentioning it was that even a bit of extra fun got excised from the site.
>The issue is that code golf didn't fit well into the intended design
Exactly! The intended design of SO was to be a hellhole, even though it was able to stave off this fate in its infancy by virtue of having too many optimistic new users.
