@psuhoffman I think my point is similar to yours and I used your forum as an example because some people consider it the holy grail of forums. But the majority of what happens there is indeed discussion, comparison and learning while actual forecasting, when done in that environment, tends to lend itself to sensationalism and catering to the crowd. My post was certainly not aimed at any particular person it was more aimed at the general thought of using the content from the MA LR forum to actually try and make a forecast will, in my opinion, end up lessening the final skill scores of the forecast. You brought up analyzing meso level stuff which is indeed more along the lines of forecasting especially when one is concentrating on past knowledge of local terrain to take model output and turn it into a viable forecast for any given area. Some of this discussion here came from previous posts talking about model verification and any particular model truly is making a forecast based on numerical data and the way it was "programmed". So I stand by my comment that forecasts, whomever may do them, originating from the MA LR forum are some of the worst.
FWIW, somewhat like you I made a post in early December where I stated (used the word punt) that the first 1/3 of winter was toast and some of the locals here did not like it. I did not go into mid to late winter as if I did it would have just been a guess but to me that does cross over into a forecast when one goes from talking about what a model is showing to saying "This is how I think it will be"