I used to think the same thing, but Randy enlightened me. To answer you, OMNI is an escape valve. If a discussion gets off track, moderators can move it to OMNI. Or they can ask the food fighters to take it to OMNI. FTers are passionate, and they don't want to go somewhere else to debate contentious subjects. They want to debate the same people they know from other forums on FT. OMNI allows this to happen without damaging the rest of FT.

Take away OMNI and the other forums and some of its activity would end up in the other forums. Moderators would have a tougher time, and members would see a lot more food fighting. Nope, that's not the anwser.