Moderating the wreck would be a full-time job because of the number of
posts and would lengthen response times for legitimate questions.

The trade-off, as you noted, is the number of off-topic, troll, and
occasional venemous posts. Moderating the wreck as been considered a
number of times; and each time the issue arose, most of the
subscribers elected to keep the newsgroup as is, warts and all.

What I do wish is that rec.woodworking was split thus:

rec.woodworking.powertoolchat
rec.woodworking.everythingelse

With no crossposting allowed.

But asking for that is like asking for 100 bd ft of free bubinga with
any purchase at every woodworker's supply store.

-jav