Actually, I quite enjoy the funny stuff and wouldn't want to miss. I'm not really concerned; in general, there always seems to be a more than sufficient amount of serious discussion. It waxes and wanes - if there's not much you find interesting right now, you usually don't have to wait more than a day or two.

And I certainly find I still even get things out of the fun discussions - there has been more than one occasion where I picked up a neat concept from a golf. Golf touches on two areas, brevity and conciseness - where the former is more syntactical, but the latter tends to happen more on a semantic level, and occasionally even further up on the algorithmical plane. In those latter times, there is often something to be picked up and put to good use in more verbose form in production code.

I also find myself intentionally adding bad ideas to serious posts, just to mention that that's also possible and to make sure the person has seen it and had explained why it is a bad idea to them before s/he picks it up elsewhere. Golf doesn't differ much in that respect.

And even when I'm golfing, I'm always careful to mention any design limitations I've introduced in the quest for brevity.

So while I do agree with your concern, I don't follow your conclusion that we have to pay (much) more attention than we already do.

Makeshifts last the longest.