As someone who has tried following one of these Owner Threads well after release, I couldn't see the value, how about device specific forums, you can subscribe to a particular forum so if you are interested in the old way, subscribing to the forum would be basically the same thing.

It'd also make finding a specific discussion that is part of the owner threads easier (I seem to recall a discussion in the S2 thread about screen locks, it'd be EASY to find the start/end of that discussion if it was a thread in a device forum, instead of having to try and find the start of the discussion, filter out all the potentially irrelevant discussions and try and find the solution X pages later).