You may find that adding "?action=add_topic&type=2" to the URL could aid your solution to your problem... What this does is preselect the type of the topic in the dropdown:
1 = Discussion
2 = Question
3 = Idea
4 = Problem

Hope that helps Paul.

Thanks, Ivan!  That might very well help me develop a workaround. I'll play with that and report back.

Next question: Any way that I can add the Forum Channel to that URL so that it can also be pre-populated?

I just answered my own question.  The answer is yes you can.  Here's how to do it:

1. Go into the Forum Channel by selecting it from the Forums menu on the right side on the Forums page.

2. Select the Add Topic button and you will see the identifier for that Forum Channel in the browser URL like "&data=86837960-708c-4cf6-8791-d234ji".

3. Merge the two in a URL like "/forums?action=add_topic&type=2&data=86837960-708c-4cf6-8791-d234ji"

This will then open an Add Topic entry page with pre-populated "Ask a Question" (type=2) for the Forum Channel to which the unique identifier (data=86837960...) belongs.

Of course. Just like in the Blogs application, once you're inside a particular Forum, click the Add Topic button and you will notice that the URL now looks something like this "?action=add_topic&data=96f1e596-a86b-4275-b265-8a90476a9b5b". All you need to do is tack on the "&type=2" at the end and you're set.

Note that the Forum Widget has that functionality built in:
- Lists topics in a channel
- Filters by a particular Type
- Allows showing of Add Topic button
- Once setup, the add button takes you to the aforementioned URL (with preselected Type and Channel). Just something new in this release that I thought was worth mentioning...

awww I was too late :)

LOL!  Sorry about that!!  But thanks for the reassurance and additional info!

Well, I've looked into this pretty extensively, but I think that the Topic Types are simply just too pervasive throughout the application.  Yes, I could hide the Topic Type selector from the Forum Topic submission page and I can create custom buttons on custom pages with forum widgets to link to adding a specific type in a specific forum; however, there are other places that I can't easily modify:

1. When viewing all forum topics, the "Add Topic" button opens a topic submission page which would default to "Discussion", and

2. Also when viewing all forum topics, the "All Topics" filter displays all Topic Types.

It's not so easy to hide these selection values through CSS (at least with my limited scripting knowledge), and at the end of the day I feel like it would be too much customization that would be impacted by future releases.  So, I think the best thing to do here is submit a feature request that will allow administrators to disable certain topic types for their community via the Control Panel and hope that this might be made available in the next release.