I will say there are different design/play philosophies between the forum community and the discord community. This is not to say one is better than the other.
What would you say are the differences?
I've never been on the Discord, but based on second-hand impressions I'd say there's a strong contingent there who wish to play Aurora as a human-vs-human wargame or ship-design tournament. They want to design, say, the best possible fleet for 200,000 research points & 1,000,000 tons of minerals to fight other peoples' "best possible fleet." As a result, they are strongly interested in the 'fairness' of various weapon types, the 'effectiveness per ton' of different-sized systems and the 'effectiveness per research point' of others.
They also care deeply about 'quirks in the code' and other ways Aurora can be exploited.
As an example, one of the founding principles of Aurora is that you shouldn't be able to nuke a planet dry on Monday (to kill its original population) and land your own people on Wednesday. There isn't supposed to be a neat, clean, simple way to kill all the aliens and keep their stuff. But parking a Terraformer in orbit and pumping out some toxic gas will do so quite effecively, and with minimal clean-up time (to remove said gas) that can be rendered irrelevant if you bring along enough Infrastructure with your own people -- easily done since you're starting from zero people. In human-vs-software Aurora this is not a problem, because the software
won't do this and you can choose not to. But in Human-vs-Human Aurora you either have to agree not to do this, or defend against it.
Likewise, Plasma Carronades are a terrrible weapon
per Research Point -- they stink at point defense and they stink at long-range beam combat. Basically, if you want to use them you need a second beam weapon as well to cover their shortcomings. . . in which case you are almost certainly better off ignoring plasma carronades completely and focusing entirely on the other beam weapon.
This isn't a problem if you're role-playing an empire, because then you're using plasma carronades because you like plasma carronades. If you're building a tournament ship or fleet every tech point counts and choosing any plasma carronade tech is simply giving yourself a handicap.
= = = = =
To summarize, this board is mainly player-vs-software, and roleplay what seems fun, ignore what seems unfun. The discord is largely player-vs-player, strive for ultimate efficiency, expoit any quirks in the software and/or advocate for 'fixing' said quirks.