I agree with your breakdown of the different approaches to the Factions TS, and the prevailing idea from before seemed to be the one you mention, having a holding period where the Factions are public so people can take stock of what's in them before their threads are dispersed to their various new locations because otherwise as you say they'll get dumped into the bottom of forums and no one will know and it didn't really accomplish much. This proposal overall makes good sense, but something I couldn't put my finger on before was nagging at me. I realize what it is now.
The end goal here is slightly misidentified, in my view. It's thought to be moving Faction threads into whatever public forum they belong. The problem is many, possibly most,
don't belong.
Taking the Land of Narnia Faction as an example, consider
this thread. The only reason that thread was created was because there was a designated 'thoughts about whatever Narnia' area where it fit. Its purpose was to present a single thought, with specific scope, directly to the Narnia community and get their immediate responses, then it was pretty much done with. Its very different than a thread that is posted to one of the public forums, where the topic is more broad and discussion is intended to continue for a good amount of time. If there was not a Narnia Faction I never would have posted that as its own thread; it doesn't meet the public forum standards. Retroactively relocating it now, putting the logistical difficulties aside of figuring out where it belongs in content (does it go into books? movies?), wherever it finally ended up it wouldn't belong in
feeling. If at the time of posting it would have been out of place on the main board, that is still the case now. Its a quintessential Faction forum thread: not fitting, and not intended to fit, in any of the primary forums.
There are multiple similar cases in that Faction, and the other Faction boards are filled with their own examples of these kinds of 'mini threads', because that's precisely what Factions are for. Things that would be out of place in the main forums because they are either too fleeting or too laser focused on a single idea or thought someone had and wanted to just put out there. They don't fit in the public forums; that's why they were posted in a Faction rather than a standard forum to begin with.
So I submit that the goal of this process should not in fact be moving Faction threads into the main forums, but moving Faction
forums into the main board. Saying just dump the threads where they would belong makes sense at first, but after actually looking at the specifics of trying to do that with a few test cases I've realized that they are already where they belong: with their other Faction threads that share a common subject matter.
I would propose a new subforum called Former Factions is created which is like the Ruins, but open for posting, and contains whatever Faction forums are decided to make public. Still self contained, where fleeting threads make sense among their own kind, but now visible to all with the opportunity for new input. And for new threads - which wouldn't be the case if the existing ones were just dumped out into one of the main forums. By preserving the Faction structure in this way people seeing these areas for the first time would feel comfortable adding their own 'passing thought' threads now that there's a place that actually makes sense to do. It would be like re-energizing the Factions themselves, with the added bonus that now that they are public that also re-energizes the board as a whole.