I have two predominant issues with The Mall which stop me from wanting it as a permanent fixture on PC.
The first is that The Mall very arbitrarily groups together three topics which are only loosely related, not providing a truly specific venue for any of them. Aside from the fact that you'd find them in, well, a mall, there's nothing that actually unites "food, fashion, and fitness" without selectively excluding other topics; as we saw during its early days, when we branded The Mall as a "lifestyle" forum we had massive issues with defining the section and had to limit it to fewer topics instead. But what, aside from the theme, actually unites those topics? I can't really think of anything that hasn't come about as a consequence of either a) The Mall's early forced redefining or b) the thematic idea of a mall.
This leads me to believe that The Mall serves simply as a "just because" venue for these topics because it's something that the community decided upon. This, in itself, is fine - after all, that's what the community was promised when Forum Frontier was initially concieved - but when we look at The Mall as a candidate for a long-term place on PC we need to put aside the reason why it was initially made and look at it as a fully fledged forum in its own right. When I try to do that, I honestly can't say I see any sense in creating a forum for the purpose of simulating a mall on PC. I just can't see why it's something that we'd want to do and I'm fairly convinced that if I'd have gone into CQ&F or HQ or whatever and said "guys, how about a forum that's basically anything you'd find in a shopping centre?" I'd just be met with some confused looks. There's no real rationale for segregating topics in this way. The overarching point here is that The Mall separates topics based only on the theme of a mall which is not a real, practical reason to move them away from other places on PC.
Which leads me to my next point - we already have a venue for everything The Mall covers, particularly when you consider the previous point that The Mall has no real reason to be loaded with the topics that it's loaded with: The Treehouse. Now, it's great that The Treehouse didn't see reduced activity due to the presence of The Mall, but at the same time the fact remains that The Mall's topics previously went into The Treehouse. Therefore we cannot say with certainty that The Mall has not harmed The Treehouse in terms of scope; instead, I'd suggest that The Treehouse's activity has increased to compensate for the siphoning of its topics into The Mall. This is all well and good but the fact remains that The Treehouse is missing topics which it used to have due to the presence of The Mall. The previous reason for this, as I mentioned earlier, was because the community voted for it but now that this reason is being put aside, I don't see any other one; The Treehouse is still being split apart here and the nature of topics in The Mall is still very well-fitting for The Treehouse. I'd argue, therefore, that there's no reason why The Mall's topics couldn't work elsewhere, and that we already have a very strong section to take back its topics should it be dissolved - the very section which all of its content came out of in the first place.
tl;dr, The Mall is an unessecary way to sort topics which aren't well-connected to each other and we already have, and already did have before The Mall's creation, a section highly suited to take The Mall's material. It's not neccessary now that its respective Forum Frontier has ended, so merge it into The Treehouse.
