Difference between areas and categories?

[Alfa1]

As VW3 worked with forums as thread containers and as categories could not be article / thread containers before, I understand how we ended up with both areas as categories as article / thread containers.
But now the setup seems confusing and illogical at first sight. Especially since we previously needed to replicate forums as articles, which now results in having the same categories as areas. What is the purpose/benefit of having both areas and categories?

[pegasus]

One of the main differences is that:
Pages inherit permissions from the area they are saved in.
Pages do NOT inherit permissions from categories they are added to.

Otherwise, categories are like thread tags that can have article text that might explain why a page would have it as a tag. Pages can still have multiple categories, but only one area.
Areas are still the primary article container, as forums were before. A page doesn't need categories, but you can add it to some if you want. A page must always be in exactly one area.

If you managed to get some Categories that are also Areas (with the same URL and page-text), then you are lucky in a way. This is only possible when importing from VaultWiki 3, because some users were able to achieve this in VaultWiki 3 as you described above.

It is possible to add pages to such a CatArea using only the Category personality. And there are actually separate list views for the Category and Area personalities on such a page, so that way you can tell the difference between pages that actually exist there, and pages that are only using it as a tag.

It was also possible to have forums that used a Special page as the landing page, but this doesn't work at all in VaultWiki 4 due to Special pages being a completely different content-type. Ideally the list snippets and other blocks act as proper alternatives for the most common combinations of this case.