quite frankly it is abhorrent that serverfault exists seperate from stackoverflow because the topics discussed are intimately related to program execution at runtime and would benefit from the faster response times generated by a larger audience.

Woah there pardner, back up the horse!

This is really the only thing in your post I vehemently disagree with - and I felt so strongly about it I wanted to put it in its own answer.

What you're basically suggesting in that little snippet is that you want developers to get to play sysadmin and have mob rule -- merge the two sites and let the devs shout down the ops folks (because by glory they do out-number us by about 2 orders of magnitude), but that ignores a core reason to have dedicated system administrators: System Administrators exist to keep developers honest.
We're the reason that application isn't allowed to run as root (or Local System, or an Enterprise Admin…).

Stack Overflow and Server Fault represent two sides to the computing coin - the developers (who write code and will do anything to make it run) and the operators (who take that code, integrate it into a stable environment, and will do anything to make sure that environment stays stable). Ideally both sides work together closely, but the roles, goals, and mindsets are by their nature very different, and which group you want to hear from depends on what your goals are. That's why Server Fault was split off from Stack Overflow to begin with.