I think just about every Town Hall in my memory had mortal nemeses say hi to eachother before or after the main event took place, compliment eachother on their roleplay, etcetera.
Without IC names, I think Town Hall just feels like a forced forum discussion, or another guided discussion. Which I don't hate, I just think it diminishes the unique experience and community feeling of the whole thing.
Clearly I have no issue with shared idents, but I do know it came up more than a few times when a senior staffer said 'great topic, put up a post about it'.
Is there some way to accommodate both preferences in one I wonder?
I still think there is a chilling effect of players not speaking out, or not speaking on some topic, if they thought doing so might bring their character under scrutiny or put them in danger of retaliation for it. If someone's faction leader, or a feared and violent solo, or their ace kool, or just a powerful and respected character, gets up at the Town Hall and says one thing, there is a considerable social pressure on others to self-censor or silence themselves or even change their opinions where there might not otherwise be.
My subjective experience was the old Town Halls were often very sanitized and couched in their language compared to what players actually thought about one another or the subject at hand, I suppose that contributes to a lighter atmosphere but it doesn't always facilitate much real growth.
Mind you, I don't actually know if OOC bits actually changes that all that much, since there's only been the short time with them! But I feel like whatever makes other people feel that can get their bugbears out without feeling they have to play politics and cater to one other, or defer to staff, is the correct approach to take.
Really there was a lot of metagaming going on with gear and what players might be up to, players had to be locked from looking at one another's bits, disguised characters or characters in secret roles had to skip Town Halls or risk being revealed, characters being found out for going corpo ('I didn't know you were still playing!'), conspicuous character absences could give plots away.
It wasn't end of the world type stuff but I definitely preferred player bits coming in compared to how things were before, myself.