Not really.  People usually decide to join a list after looking at the archive.  THey would look at the "help" archives and see lots of questions, followed by good answers.  They would say "this looks like a good place for me to ask my questions", and they would have no idea how many people are actually reading the list.

People can't tell how many other people are on a list, they can only judge the traffic.  squeak-dev has enough traffic to intimidate most people.  It also has a lot of topics that seem esoteric to a newcomer.  Splicing "help" traffic into squeak-dev would not make either of these things happen to the "help" list. 

My only concern is that splicing the lists together would require someone to do some work, and I don't want to wait around until it happens, because things like that can be low priority and take a long time to get done.  I'd like to see the newbie list created ASAP and then for someone to splice them together "soon".

-Ralph Johnson