From my perspective, I just don't have many questions to ask of the random sampling of others that may be reading at any given time. Perhaps unfortunately, most of the work that I do is in the realm of reimplementing solved problems, and generally speaking the solutions that I need to come up with either have tons of documentation available or truly are of the cutting edge, nobody's done it before sort of work that I don't actually want to let the community in on until it's done. :)

The programming challenges that I run into aren't particularly restricted to game development, so I ask them on StackOverflow.

However, I still come here hoping to run into some good conversation and maybe help steer some newbies right. Perhaps it's exactly that attitude that will prevent more pros from joining up, though.

Richard Fabian's "runtime game tweaks" question could be one of the coolest ones around if it revealed an implementation that one could just go and grab. As it is, yeah that's the coolest feature ever and everyone implements it themselves so I don't really have much to add. Go go reinventing the wheel!

As to reinventing the wheel, I think the NDA issue does sort of coincide with the fact that there is generally no sharing of "work product" between "pro" game developers, so discussions turn higher level and conceptual or end up of lists comparing Jira to FogBugz and Unreal to Unity.

Not to mention, many of us participate in other fora which are either primarily "pros" or exclusively (e.g. invite-only). Mailing lists like gdalg or sweng-gamedev serve a much more focused purpose, and I suspect they therefore detract from an individual's desire to join yet another community.