Null wanted me to, quote "grow some fucking balls", so fine, not even going to be nice with what I'm about to say:
As for 9chan being a "failure", let's be honest about that. Null has a checkered reputation in the chan community that already hobbled him out the gate, he did a poor job of promoting it, and it was obvious he wanted the politics obsessed crowd to use it, but again he left that completely optional and people treated it as such. If he was hoping it would explode and become the politics flytrap, I don't have an Optimistic rating big enough for how naive that was.
As for being pissed about politics seeping into damn near everything, with the rise of SJW culture, where "the personal is the political, and given how it gave rise to opponents who are just as bad in an inverse way, politics becoming omnipresent was universal and bound to become an infected tumor on the discussion of most of the people we cover in some way. Only way to mostly get rid of is to pare down every subforum where it's an issue, which would cut out most of the site entirely. This is a genie that can't be put back into the bottle until we have a culture shift where people left, right, and center quit politisperging about everything.
In short, this is damned near impossible to avoid in this day and age, and while I'd love to go back to a simpler time too, that shit gets tedious to discuss, it's not going to happen anytime soon, hoping otherwise is idiotic.
And since I've been asked to quit being so nice, fine, I will take the gloves off entirely:
Null, some of your biggest problems have happened because you've kicked the can down the road and kept doing it till you smashed into a pile of cans you kicked down the road. A lot of things that became massive problems could've been dealt with earlier, but you only did something when you couldn't ignore it any longer. If you want to be more proactive to make sure this isn't a problem, great, but in this regard, I don't really pity you anymore.
And frankly, I think this place is not long for this world, so I've already planned to move on. If you can keep this place going despite everything, fine, but it's naive as hell to think a lot of crap that warped this site into what it is now can be reverted. There is no time machine, and what you have is what you have, and you can either work with that or shutter this place.