Moot is very close to what I imagined bbPress could evolve into. The upcoming native support for replacing comments in bbPress 2.6 is nice, but too little too late in my case. I want to try Moot out on my new personal blog soon.

The native comment system could definitely benefit from some improvements as well, but I don't see its usefulness extending much further than as a very basic "compatibility baseline" format for other comment systems to be compatible with, so that you can always have your data back even if you resort to a third party service. If WordPress/Automattic don't intend to innovate in this space, the least they can do is pave the way for the ones who will.

For both work and my hobby project, I plan to be using Discourse. A full blown forum is definitely not for the average blogger (something that took me a while to concede) but it seems right for my purposes.

Thanks for bringing this discussion back on the agenda Jeff. I can easily get behind Brian's suggestions and I'm thrilled to hear some of them might be making their way into core sooner rather than later.