Let's be clear: bbPress was a perfectly fine product with 0.9 - it is a fairly efficient forum framework.

Matt can only blame himself for changing course and steering it in the wrong direction with 1.0 - massively bloating the code by having it converted to use "backPress".

But then backPress was never folded back into WordPress so the whole extreme effort became pointless. bbPress was left bloated and broke many existing plugins, resetting the whole community's progress.

bbPress will never work as designed as a plugin for WordPress because the WordPress plugin structure has become far too outdated and inefficient. You can't have a competitive forum product with over a megabyte of code loading and several dozen queries for every page render. This is why existing forum plugins for WordPress are not popular.

But bbPress 0.9 by itself works wonderfully as a standalone or in pair with WordPress.

Sam Bauers worked damn hard to make Matt's bbPress 1.0 directive come true and it's practically a crime that his work on bbPress.org 2.0 will never see the light of day because it was also a very fine effort that could have really grown and solidified the community.

Automattic should not be a "one-hit wonder" with WordPress - bbPress 0.9 should have been finished as originally designed.