Quote from TGregg:
Chit Chat is useful to me (as a mod) as a place to dump threads that have either wandered off topic, or never were on the forum topic to begin with.
Advertising pays for all this, and eyeballs are one of the things the sponors like (I think anyway - I'm completely seperate from the business side). So, Chit Chat helps pay the bills, and keeps the distractions down by being in a seperate forum.
But I do like the one-time registration fee idea. And I think it would be great to have a one-alias per person rule.