While the volume of responses in Reptiles Etc might be lower, you are much more likely to get accurate and relevant information. Once you develop your own knowledge base about a subject, you'll quickly find that many of the responses in Chit Chat are either half-baked or flat out wrong. There are a few good posters that frequent those areas, but I wouldn't say that it's the majority.
When you're dealing with specialty animals like turtles, you're much more likely to make a serious mistake when you rely on advice given by people who really don't know what they're talking about. I hesitate to make an example, as I'm not particularly familiar with turtles, but here goes: you may think that any fish kept with your turtles are mostly in danger of being eaten, but you should also be concerned about ammonia poisoning. Turtles are generally known to be both messy eaters and to have relatively inefficient digestive systems, both of which can quickly overwhelm a filtration system. It may be possible to mix your turtles with other types of animals, but you may need to bump up your filtration first. I point this out because I haven't seen anyone else breathe a word about it in either of your turtle threads.
On a slightly different note, I also have a suspicion that you've been using stronger language than is appreciated by certain of the mods. William (the admin) has taken this stance in the past:
On the news I think you will find that before the watershed they don't allow any swearing on it, we don't have a watershed time as we have members all over the world as such swearing is prohibited on the forum.
I'm not exactly sure which words are considered out-of-bounds by the watershed restriction as I'm in the States, but you may want to keep that in mind.
You're right that this is a pretty heavily moderated forum, but I think that the level of moderation is proportionate to the intended purpose of being a family-friendly source of information about tropical fish. Unfortunately, you're also right that this has left you a bit out in the cold as you want information about a fairly uncommon aquatic reptile and are accustomed to a more casual type of forum. But for the beginning aquarist who is also a beginning internet user (and we see a lot in both categories), TFF works really well. I remember being mildly scarred as a double-newb when I visited another large fish forum.
I wanted to read a post about tetras, not to see a bunch of vulgar gifs and catfights. It also made me cringe to see someone replying to a child's inquiry with a multicolored flashing f-bomb in his signature.
There are a ton of fishkeeping sites that are FFA, but as far as I can tell, this is the only generalist site that is officially family-friendly. I think that's the reason that TFF shows up first in most searches, even though it may not have the highest membership on the web.
" - Deleted) to name a few.
