In addition to the taxonomic issues, there is a fundamental site structure issue here, and it is that flags are pretty hard to find unless you specifically go looking for them. I would venture to say that hardly anybody even knows that flags exist unless they are the type to poke and prod into all the details of everything.
The forums also suffer from being off to one side (many people never visit the forums ever), but they do have tools to make it easier to find conversations that interest you, and also to stumble across conversations that might interest you. And it’s way more intuitive to people that you should go to the forums if you want to discuss something.
It seems to me that right now, flags are places where these important conversations mostly are not happening. Compared to the forums, they get much less traffic and attention.
I’m not sure what the solution is. There appear to be real practical reasons for this separation. (The expense of maintaining the forum platform, basically.) But just saying “this should be discussed in the flags” does not seem to be working. Maybe some tools to make it easier to find the flags would help?