I'm glad it was merged as well, I did look in it regularly and posted as well, however in some cases you may have a situation where you don't know which forum to put you issue in, the regular forum or the Tech side.
As others have mentioned, it didn't get viewed quite as much, I think the major posters in the D* section did reply in it, it will still make it easier this way.
One problem was when someone would start a thread stating the same thing in both sides, people would reply in one and the poster wouldn't see the reply because they were looking in the other location.