Very interesting interview and I like JJJ his approach to guiding BuddyPress forward.

I think BuddyPress has gotten to the point where it can almost do anything in the right hands. My biggest worry as a full-time BP Developer/Consultant and someone who's heavily invested in the future of the plugin, is the huge amount of potential users that are lost simply BECAUSE of these possibilities. The barrier to entry is too high, and finding high quality tutorials, plugins and inspiration is a challenge if you don't know where to look.

I think that we (as the BP community) have not been able to properly showcase and explain the power of BuddyPress and thus lowering the entry barrier. I don't think that this is because of the code quality or the direction the project is taking, it's more a matter of figuring out how to best present the information to new users.

There is documentation, there are awesome plugins & themes, and there are amazing sites powered by BuddyPress used by regular folks and "the enterprise". But this remains largely hidden and this hurts new users. They need that guidance and inspiration to see that BuddyPress is indeed a real solution used by real people with similar goals as theirs.

I don't think this task should fall on the hands of the developers, or all of this should take place on BP.org. Just as WP/WooCommerce/EDD and other successful solutions have lots of high quality 3rd party resources I hope that BuddyPress will slowly move towards that as well. This is something that should be done by the community of site owners that currently use BuddyPress to power their social networks. By showcasing their community and inspiring others by blogging about their community, what they've learned and the plugins they have used.

That being said I'm incredibly excited about the future of the plugin and huge thanks to the Core development team and the many contributors that helped shape BuddyPress to what it is today.