Discord is fine right now, but at any point it can decide to destroy what makes it good, and many communities will stick with it through inertia. I’d recommend setting up matrix with a discord bridge for the communities you don’t have control over, while trying to convince admins to switch to matrix when you can. Having a matrix account/server will also be helpful if you decide to join one of the many foss projects that uses matrix for their communications.
The scientific process does not operate on the order of hours/days, but months/years. It’s very impressive that responses have come out as fast as they have. The fastest I’ve seen a paper come out in my field after results were in was 8 months, and that took 5 people basically dropping everything else they were working on immediately and working full time to get the paper written as fast as possible while keeping the same rigor.