The topics are different.
One is a general discussion thread about the coin. For example, recently it included discussion of new features, scalability, etc. It was moved to the Announcements section, which is a bit odd since it was not the thread used to announce the coin, but all of those threads were closed because the developer of the coin wanted to corral all discussion off onto his own forum where he could fully control what was and was not discussed (since he
ripped off the Bitcoin code, removing the attributions in violation of its MIT license and lied about it, he has some serious skeletons to hide).
That thread was created as a replacement to have a place to discuss the coin within the Alt forum here, and with that focus on general discussion, being in the Announcements section makes a certain amount of sense. While there may be criticism there, the topic of the thread is not criticism, it is general discussion of the coin.
The second is specifically a warning to call out specific deceptive practices that some members of that coin community engage in on a regular and well-documented basis.
To me those seem quite different topics. Do you disagree?
I agree that putting the warning in the general unmoderated discussion topic might steer it toward discussing the warning or about the self-moderation, rather than about the coin in general. However, I also don't like a situation where unmoderated discussion topics come with a censorship warning topic that links to it (this is pretty much guaranteed because there isn't really a need for a unmoderated topic unless there's censorship going on). So you'd end up with 3 topics on one subject: the original self moderated one, the unmoderated one, and the censorship warning one that links to the unmoderated one), which ends up cluttering up the forum.
This is why I prefer having the warning embedded within the unmoderated topic. As for the any possible confusion about what the topic should be about, you can indicate in the topic body, after the warning that the topic should be general discussion, rather than about the self-moderation or the warning itself.
