Fudge know why the internet is so bad at having discussion about photography itself other than gearhead discussions.
Is anyone on any painting forums? Do they just around talking about paints rather than paintings?
I hang out on
https://www.wetcanvas.com/, which is probably the biggest painting forum. It covers all media (oils, acrylics, watercolours, pencils, printmaking, etc). The users discuss both paintings and paints.
Some types of media can be quite technical, and using paints without following appropriate guidelines can lead to issues later (eg, deterioration of the paint surface), so there is a fair amount of discussion of methods and techniques, and the chemistry within the paints and the mediums they're mixed with. There is some discussion of the gear (brushes, surfaces, easels, etc), but that's mostly about build quality and what they're like to use. Development of new gear doesn't happen much because the overall activity and technology is very mature (oil painting has been around for at least six centuries - there are only so many ways you can knock some bits of wood together to make an easel).
There is very little advocacy of particular types of paint over others - there might be some debate/adovcacy within a paint type, such as traditional oils and water mixable oils, but I don't think I've ever seen anything like a watercolour painter coming into an oil painting section and telling people that oil paints are crap and they should be doing watercolours. That would be bizarre. People would wonder if the watercolourist was alright in the head. By and large, people use what they like to use and nobody gives a monkeys what somebody else uses.
As for discussing paintings, there seems to be plenty of discussion of both famous paintings, and of the works of forum members. All the usual stuff that might be seen in discussion of photographs, such as composition, colour, tone, what the image might convey or 'mean', etc. For member paintings, often advice and critique.
I have to say, the notion that photographs are supposed to be sharp seems to me to be rather out of date. The art world was on its way to binning that sort of thing about two centuries ago. Turner started as a fairly conventional Academy painter in the late 1790s, and had become more and more fuzzy by the 1830s. He in turn influenced the impressionists (Monet studied his works) who experienced some resistance at first, but were accepted by the time Van Gogh and others were being influenced by them around the 1880s. By then, modern art was in full swing and the technical stranglehold of the academies was well and truly binned in the sense that it was no longer an imperative.
In photography, people can be incredibly narrow-minded when it comes to things like the equipment used to make photographs, or what photographs are supposed to look like. Van Gogh died 10 years before Kodak democratised photography with the box Brownie. By the time the masses were handed cameras, art had already dumped any notion that striving for technical perfection was the de facto and required approach. And yet, here we are, 120 years later, and we have gear advocates derailing threads with unwelcome opinions, and people slagging off images because they don't reach some arbitrary technical standard.
I sometimes find the photography scene very parochial. There are people who really could benefit from stepping outside the world of cameras and take in the wider context of image-making that has been going on for centuries.