Killing options (good decisions are fine, we call them intelligent defaults) is one of the worst ever policies at WordPress, making for a tool which is slowly nearly unuseable out of the box (as you need so many plugins to get up to speed). Great that John James Jacoby is breaking out of the self-imposed straitjacket.

Particularly as anyone using BuddyPress in seriousness will either have development chops or working with someone who does.