Jeff, I'm just catching up on your replies from earlier. Maybe I won't miss anything.

It seems crazy to me that bbPress has been around for years and Justin Tadlock can whip up a plugin that has a more polished experience.

"Whip up" is probably not right. I built a forum plugin years ago. Plus, hindsight and all.

I built the first rought draft of my new plugin in two days and had it running live on Theme Hybrid inside of a week. Since then, I've been spending every free moment I have polishing things.

I don't know if version 1.0 of mine will be more polished than bbPress. However, I'm not going to have all the same features, so that leaves me with time to work on the smaller feature set. Sometimes, simple is better for the overall user experience.

The nomenclature may not be new, but it’s new to me. After using phpbb2 for a few years and then vBulletin, that software doesn’t use those terms. They use threads, replies, categories, but not Topics and Voices.

I was referring to only the "forum" and "category" terms. The other terms are definitely different from a lot of other forum software, but forum and category are fairly standard from what I've seen.

Nomenclature isn't such a big deal though if things are adequately explained. Putting "glossary" on the to-do list...

I’m willing to give your plugin a shot. It probably won’t have what I want out of the box to which you’ll tell me there’s plugins for that...

Now's a good time to let me know about features you'd like to see. Ultimately, I'm going to put in the features I want, but if you don't tell me about the features you want, I might not ever want them. Follow?

There'll definitely be times when I feel it's appropriate to use an add-on plugin. There'll also be times when someone other than me has a great idea about what should be a part of the core plugin.

Let me ask you something Justin, would it be easier for you to create your forum plugin as stand alone software that has a simple bridge to the WordPress user base? What benefits do you get other than tight integration by developing it as a plugin?

It'd be both easier and harder to build it as standalone software. Working with the current WP APIs has its limitations in a lot of ways. Those limitations could easily be surpassed with some custom tables and custom APIs. There are some real pain points when trying to build, not just a forum plugin, but any plugin of this scale with WordPress.

However, there are many other useful things than the built-in user integration, more important than the user integration in some ways: themes, roles, capabilities, formatting, plugin API (hooks), entire WP admin, and the list goes on. In the long run, as WP matures as a CMS, some of the current limitations will disappear. I built my first forum plugin about 4 years ago with WP. I can honestly say that it was much easier this time around with some of the newer developer features.