I can definitely see/understand trying to achieve a balance, and more casual communities strike me as easier to grow. What I’ve noticed in Reddit’s format are that enthusiast communities can be broadly categorized as layperson-enthusiast vs. participant-enthusiast. In aviation this is roughly spectators vs. pilots, and I suspect the former outnumbers the latter by a couple orders of magnitude. Without some significant guidance or moderation, most communities will likely favor the light/layperson level of interest vs. the heavy/participant level of interest.

As an example, r/medicine is a public sub that consists almost entirely of professionals (physicians, nurses, pharmacists, etc), and works hard to prevent itself from devolving into laypeople discussing personal medical situations, or pre-med students talking about applying to medical schools. It’s a really high-quality sub, even for laypeople to lurk or comment in. r/lawyers achieves a similar thing by being a private community. r/dentistry in comparison has devolved into predominantly laypeople asking for advice, so it’s very thin on professional representation or discussion. This is an easy trap to fall into when the casually-interested general public vastly outnumbers the professionals (especially with a lack of professionals who are willing to moderate). r/medicine legitimately has volunteer moderators that are no-kidding board-certified physicians in some area of practice. I’m fairly sure that r/flying has volunteer moderators who are professional airline pilots.

I’m not really sure what to say or advocate for, but as a pilot myself, I appreciate what r/flying provides and what r/aviation or r/flightsim does not. I’m sure you can find a similar situation in communities that are enthusiasts of car racing, vs communities that are participants in computer simulation racing, vs communities that are participants in IRL car racing. Reading about aviation has a lower barrier to entry than playing aviation games, which has a much lower barrier to entry than actually flying planes IRL.

A new community that wishes to be centered around participants is going to have to divert a relative flood of casual interest to some other place, and uphold standards of discussion that prevent a slide into revolving around lay interest.