>>/60962/
> Too overly focused on contemporary politics, not enough focus on autistic hobbies and autistic people the way it was when I found it.

Thank you. Not just this one sentence, but the whole paragraph. This better articulates what I've been trying to say for a long, long time now.
I'm gonna keep clear of specifics, but, speaking generally, I got lucky over the last year and a half. I stumbled on one thread on one board with a ton of creative dedicated people. I was inspired to launch a creative project of my own, and see it through to completion across the topical threads. Was some serious hard work, made many mistakes, would not approach this project in the same way in light of what I learned, and I learned a lot. But I finished it and got some positive feedback from a handful of people who enjoyed the result.
But that's it. I won't launch any creative work on an imageboard of any kind in the future. The overall board was falling into the same dynamics you highlight well before I found that one thread, and became nothing special well before the hack hit. Even the thread became nearly dead from a lack of creative people before the hack.
But man did I get lucky.