Cool project Ryan, there is a real need for more quality bbPress themes!

I've tweaked Kakumei to match a few WordPress themes so far, and I'm currently working on my first original bbPress theme.

When it comes to including plugin functionality themes, I'm on the fence. I like to keep themes simple and not have important functionality dependent on the functionality.

It seems like redundant code anyways, why redo the code for some feature, or roll it into the theme if it already exists as a plugin? Particularly for bbPress where there are not that many plugins, it seems like that effort would be better put into new plugins, or updating plugins that don't work properly with 1.0 yet.

I can understand how you'd want to be able to include more of these features in one package. But it seems like a bit of a hack to me. Some of these features should make it into core eventually no matter how lightweight they want to keep bbPress. I think rather than themes with plugin functionality, I'd rather see more comprehensive plugins that can replace 4 or 5 smaller plugins. Like Nightgunner5's excellent bbPress Moderation Suite.

Myself, I am trying to build my bbPress theme to work with existing plugins better. So that if you install the bbcode button plugin, or signatures, it styles them to fit into the theme, but without being dependent on them.

You've started an ambitious project though! I'm definitely interested to see what you come up with, and if I can contribute anything that I learn from building my own theme, I'd be happy to pitch in.