I do believe that the choice among e-mail/forum/faq for wine depends on the individual approach to wine.
For people, like me, who approach wine to solve their specific problems, and when solved they forget about wine until a new need arises, if ever (but i am aware my own are general problems in science) the faq solution is the best one.
Just a couple of examples:
1) I posted a query about the feasibility of running the chemical drawing package "chemdraw" on wine. Lack of a package on unix that allows exchanging files with chemdraw is today the hindrance to have molecular scientists fully to unix (linux). Not a minor gap in science because most chemdraw users do not know unix and thrive on restrictive OSs that limit their science and their minds.
2)I posted a query about the feasibility of running nikon film scanner through wine, just to have the nikon coolscan V (most unfortunately my own, as available in europe, is usb and not scsi). This is by far a minor problems with respect to the one above but it is anyway another example of query.
Well, I got no answer (except one privately from my country). What about access now to my queries? Practically no access, so that I have no hope to get further help about. It might be different with faq.
I agree however that a forum may be of interest to those who approach wine per se and have a standing supply of problems for wine.
I hope this is a contribution (although i am aware that having both faq and forum requires having people to maintain both them). If not, forget about my mail.
Cheers francesco pietra