"..He said he sees AWP as an extension of the physical San Diego AWP group where he and other members enjoy open-table discussions...."

Which really was one of the issues with it. At 28k members from all over it long ago left behind being an extension of the SD group.

"... I must say that some attitudes ... towards some not-so-advanced users are somewhat condescending if not outright demeaning..."

Well it's the ADVANCED WP group. I've not been in there for 2-3 years but once they exceeded a few thousand users they kept getting, over and over and over, questions like "what's the best host?" and "What's the best plugin for X?" which simply don't belong in an advanced group. Frankly, I'd bet that perhaps 10% of the 28k members do anything resembling actual WP development.