I agree. The development is simply too slow. I had to abandon bbpress for something being advanced more aggressively. As of 2016, bbpress seems a bit too "retro" for true functionality.

I've switched my discussion forums/comments over to a discourse based site. With the wp-discourse plugin (available on github) I'm able to integrate Wordpress commenting into the forum site with little effort.

Discourse is a highly evolved (and fast performing) open-sourced platform on a quick development cycle. Has all the features I needed with plenty of community driven add-ons available.

Chad