My understanding, as an outside observer, is that DDG is more about building a community (similar to HN, but probably more like metafilter). I get this idea from their offering of an XMPP service and site-specific syntax, so I may be off, but I would say they would like to cultivate a tight-nit community (I'm a scroogle user, but this sounds interesting depending on how they continue).
You are right -- we would very much like to cultivate a tight-nit community. At the same time, we'd like to go mainstream as well, and we hope the community will help us do so.
