I've just been invited to the TurboTax Live team. They're offering "flexible at-home schedules, excellent pay, amazing training and software."
I wonder if THAT is the reason why they switched the forums. If they make the TurboTax forum not helpful, then more TurboTaxers will be forced to upgrade to the "Live" version for some help. The Accountants and Quickbooks forums are just a by-product of changing the TurboTax forum.
As a side note, I've peaked in at the TurboTax forum a few times. Many of Intuit employee "experts" only give vague, general information and don't actually answer the question. Other answers are completely wrong. Of course, there are a few employees that answer well.
@TaxGuyBill ask @qbteachmt what happened over in the QuickBooks community. They prettied it up with badges and things to make it so attractive that folks just couldn't stay away. Well, everybody except the AllStar group over there. A number of answers over there were provided by Intuit employees. Of course most of those answers were wrong, but who cares when the place looked so pretty! I hung around there for awhile (just for the free lutefisk), but the folks that were carrying the load over there got extremely frustrated. I haven't taken a gander over there in centuries so I don't know if any of the folks carrying the real workload are still around.