This is going to be three short, sort of unrelated things from this thread all pushed together into one post, and I'm doing a card list for you all, so you can get used to hearing from me for 10 days or so.
This is my first post here outside of tournaments in over 6 months, while in the past 6 months I have posted over 1700 times in the strategy focused sections of the Dominion discord. Somehow the discord seems both more serious and more friendly, and it is probably mostly because of the attitudes here as O mentioned. Also in the strategy sections of discord and here, in the last 3 days discord has had more unique posters (and more posts, but that is format driven) - I am not alone.
The main reason discussions here are so unproductive and repetitive is that people don't give reasons or examples as evidence. Preaching bores people and they don't take anything away from it so they repeat a similar question and get preached at again. The forum should embrace what discord can't do, and that is well thought out longer posts. Getting rid of the upvote system which rewards low effort posts that people outside this forum likely get put off by would be a small step in that direction I think, and a little bit of self-moderation by posters would be the much larger one. Or going all out make a word minimum of at least 20, but really a little bit of self-moderation should be enough.
As for the original topic of this thread, articles are quite bad at teaching you how to play good Dominion. What a good article does is it establishes the author's framework for thinking about Dominion to the reader and makes some mentions of little things that might be helpful (Titandrake is quite good at this). In a huge number of low stress games (bots are kind of useful here), the reader needs to develop their own framework that isn't just "do what the articles say," otherwise they will get worse because they are going to have a bunch of conflicting messages from different authors because the authors think differently. Incorporating the little things into something they already have and is familiar to them is much easier than needing to think about each little thing independently.