I thought you guys were adapting fine when you continued the topic of Ginkgo on the OT-board. Though I can imagine that it's hard if a thread is going off topic and you're supposed to say something like "we'll continue the discussion in the OT board".
I can imagine it's similar to being in some kind of official meeting and when the discussion starts getting lighter and off-topic, everyone decides to exit the conference room to the cafeteria to continue the chat. It kinda takes away the mood and motivation to continue...if you can follow me there
For the same reason, I think it's even a bigger obstacle if the users were to continue the chat in a whole different forum, but I'm not here to stop anyone to register at your forum

I think Antony means you can post an off-topic message in a thread, but you're not allowed to hijack entire threads. See Thread hijacking