No it's not. The German debianforum.de for example doesn't suffer from this problem.
What I wrote here [1] in the last paragraph in reply to reinob about how a forum can work is essentially what I observe on debianforum.de and some few other forums that work fine. Yes, there are fanboys too. TBH I'm one of them. I'm a FLOSS fanboy but the community almost works like a family, not like a bunch of technically ingenious but anti-social people (exaggeration). There are disputes too but just like I wouldn't truly want to hurt a brother I wouldn't want to hurt any other community member there. So I don't try to escalate things and others seem to feel the same way.
The moderators at debianforum.de are elected by the community and are fully integrated into it (they don't stand out due to their power).
Of course from time to time there are new users who don't want to obey to the forum rules (which are mostly simply common sense written down) but they rarely survive their first day in the community.

On the other hand I must admit that this is really an exception. Most forums I know suffer from the same problems like TMO (some even to a much bigger extent). One reason might be that this is an international community with lots of different ideas of "way of life" and "common sense". It might be impossible to find a common set of community rules that seem self-explanatory to all members of all cultures here. I guess we'd need a sociologist to find that out.

[1] http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...1&postcount=16