Nowadays, I don't bother subscribing to mailing lists: I subscribe gmane to them :->
I personally dislike forums, but agree that they are more popular with most other people. However, I have seen some fairly nice forum/email integrations. For example, Freepbx.org allows you to either subscribe by email or use the web forum. It's a bit annoying when posts get edited because you get a duplicate email, but it's infrequent enough to not be an issue. Perhaps something similar will work here
I agree though that whilst gmane is nice, people who like forums want a forum and not gmane.
However, forums are time consuming to maintain and spammers plague them. Perhaps someone who is interested would volunteer to step up and install/maintain one?
Ed W