I remember when I made the jump over to animanga fandoms late(!) at about 18 and was initially quite startled to discover that I was now one of the older ones in certain fandoms, certainly one of the more experienced in fandom terms.

I don't want to say it's an unsupervised space, but perhaps it's not the older fans who are hosting a lot of the discussion. There's probably a knock on from that.

Your post just about sums up a lot of it. Well said.