<blockquote>
  <p>My question: is having two small, heavily intertwined sites better than one large one related to 'data analysis' in all its forms?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>For what it's worth, my answer is 'no'. If anything, I think Data Science should be merged into Cross Validated. </p>

<p>I can respect that some people would want to keep the engineering and theory separate (I'll let them make that case); however:</p>

<ol>
<li>It is possible to have a single site which deals with different aspects of the same area. Tags have a role to play. </li>
<li>It's kind of annoying having to check two sites, have two sets of rep etc.</li>
<li>There will be wasteful duplication and dilution of conversations.</li>
<li>Computational tractability is often driving the choice of theories to pursue. IMO there is a complementarity between theoretical questions and engineering issues.</li>
<li>It's going to get dull seeing 'is this one for data science?' in comments fields.</li>
<li>One could argue that it is inconsistent that on CV we will sometimes provide R/matlab code, but seem to shy away from larger systems engineering questions or less familiar software. </li>
</ol>
