First of all I must say I have no idea where the 'later this year' is coming from. The current 2.6-alpha version is extremely stable and already used by a number of people (including myself) without issues. So I would more say 'in the next months', now that some items have been pushed to 2.7.

Seeing the bbPress support forums where people ask how to migrate from other forums towards bbPress and the 300k+ active installs it's probably not that retro. As hooks and filters are available at almost every place, the number of add-ons is still growing every day (see mine :-) ), so capabilities are being extended.

So checking what already exist elsewhere, what people like in other forums, what the community is expecting and then enter it into core is where the focus could go in 2.7 and 2.8, but let's all get to 2.6 first ! Anyway all developers can propose any code to add, that's the whole idea, no ?