The strength/problem with Programmers SE was that it didn’t have a clear scope. In the beginning there was just SO. Then they needed some place to dump all stuff that didn’t fit on SO, so Programmers was born.
Then later down the line, some people tried to organize the site and make it live up to the same strict posting standards as the rest of SE. After that, nobody knew what was on topic an longer and site moderation went haywire, completely arbitrary and subjective. The site turned almost completely useless. This happened a long time before the name change to Software Engineering.
Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing to have a site that allows pretty much any programming-related question, with a high tolerance for a wide range of topics.
What this boils down to as far as MVP is concerned is probably: should we have the same quality standards network-wide, or leave this to the communities? On SE this is in theory left to the communities, but in practice most users float across many different communities and they will bring their quality/scope expectations from one community to the next. So maybe a “lax scope” site like “Programmers” is doomed to fail, if it sits next to a site like SO, because the culture will spill over across the sites.