Okay, so I've followed this thread, and I have a range of thoughts and what I think is a simple solution.
First of all, if disk space is an issue, it's easily corrected with a $100 IDE drive. I think the real issue is that Jer doesn't like to work on half baked ideas unless they're more fully baked or someone else he trusts is cooking in the kitchen :-/.
Second of all, it seems to me that the biggest problem is simply one of presentation. This is the relevant page: http://www.winehq.org/site/forums
The current information is really quite poorly presented. There is way too much information; the useful bits (the Gmane and Google links) are buried way to deep imho.
Third, I think the biggest problem is that there are 2 places to go for help. The wine-users mailing list, and the legacy usenet newsgroup.
For a while, the two were connected, until the old gateway we were using broke down, and Jer ripped his hair out trying to make it work.
But time has passed, and now Mailman has a builtin news <--> mail gateway system, and maybe we can reconnect them. (I'll go discuss this with Jer; if I'm not heard from ever again, it's because he beat me to a pulp with his printout of the Mailman manuals <grin>).
But if we can reconnect them, then I think a nice solution would be to retool that page so the Google interface pops out: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine
That looks forumishy enough to me to satisfy many people, and yet is nicely backwards compatible with all current systems.
Cheers,
Jeremy