Ekecheiria
Personally, and I did look in depth at this and other platforms, zOMG is a social platform already, so things like 'Towns' seems limited in its functions compared to zOMG. zOMG is Towns but with a better interface. It would be wise to integrate the two. It seems like the whole of Gaia Online is in beta and being tested by the company, however there is a lack of investment to bring all these beta projects together.
Overall the lack of consumer research is a big failure on the part of the company. The company must be profitable for it to be here after all, although it is not innovative. These forums for instance are very archaic in format, a lot of none money making individuals set up much more intuitive and modern formats.
In a business perspective there seems to be little direction on making the assets the company has lucrative. This could be due to bad decisions in the past or a bad management team now, I'm not sure.
My thinking is that if Gaia were to integrate its platforms into one, zOMG would be the foundation as its the most sophisticated platform they have. Every other platform seems somewhat dated or lacks intuitiveness or both.
Your analysis of Gaia's competence and performance is spot on.
rofl
Although I don't agree that everything should've been integrated. While many people here like zOMG!, not everyone does. So forcing them to do so would be a bad idea. Especially since zOMG! only came out 4 or 5 years after Gaia opened? There were other mini games long before that that people enjoyed playing separately and would probably not enjoy having to do so through zOMG! zOMG! is already a huge fuss with the lag and time it takes to load, etc.
An integrated platform is best when done from the very beginning or through advance notice and slowly adapting the userbase to it. The latter is just way too difficult, especially for a company like Gaia.