If Mike was a bit defensive in his answer it's because this kind of thing
has been an issue in the past. I think you're right that he needn't be
excusing old choices.
X-grad was a response to a perceived need in a "historical period" (1991 is
long ago in Cyber-Academe :-) It flourished for its first term, saw renewed
action in the two terms of 1992, but then, as Mike says, it withered. This
is a common pattern for the x-siblings (offspring of the xfamily, which is
in itself a lovely metaphorical term offering great possibilities for
conflating a number of heterogeneous referents (is that good or bad?)).
The exceptions are xclass//xedu and xact. These lists lasted over a long
time and still had patterns of potential growth when they were terminated.
They DID compete for much of the same limited resources in reading//writing
time as xlchc, although audiences were not entirely overlapping. And they
DID provide for confusion as to which list a thread was actually running
on. Fran=E7oise may know more about that aspect.
As for the floundering of grad lists... I haven't been on one, although I
have been on other "flounders". And I haven't really done the analysis --
the tools for it are surely all around here in CHAT. Commonsensically I'd
say (and this suddenly makes me think, once more, of Louise Yarnall's
grappling with theory-as-no-news)... anyway: both newcomers//grads and
oldtimers//profs are needed for the proper functioning of a
knowledge-producing activity system like this. It's the interplay of
"fresh" questions from new arrivals with a variety of backgrounds and
"wise" questions from more or less permanent settlers with some longterm
experience of the terrain that makes for fruitful harvests.
(Hah: my commonsense comes out first in community-of-practice terms
crossbred with activity theory and then as cultivation metaphor. Voici la
Bricoleuse...)
Eva