The best analogy would be if Walmart was converted into a shopping mall - you can still buy everything you need during a single trip, but now you would visit specific stores within the mall instead of having one huge endless store to walk through.
The idea underlying W3K was to make a site more browsable and closer-knit. We wanted to make a place where people could feel they were a part of micro-communities surrounding specific topics interesting to them, yet still be a part of the larger community as a whole. And coming soon, I want to make a site where people could create their own arenas around any topic interesting to them.
