Hey Marcus, good point about caching and your ad situation. (And thanks for the mention.) I meant more just the day-to-day pain that caching causes regular site development and maintenance. At least I'm aware of it, but clients sometimes try to tweak CSS or make other changes and get can't figure out why their change isn't working. And, even though I know I can clear the cache, that takes time. If I could quickly put it in a non-cached state for a bit, that would be nice (but, I suppose would create problems for WP Engine and high-traffic sites while it was off, or if people forgot it being turned off).

re: theme and image optimization - I've absolutely used themes where the included graphics weren't optimized very well. That should certainly be checked!

re: BuddyPress and bbPress

I'm rather concerned about this tread of everyone using stuff like Facebook to replace forums. Facebook is quickly becoming the new AOL, and I think this is eventually going to become quite detrimental to WordPress if the trend continues.

It's bad for WordPress, as well as site owners, as you want to keep users at your site, not on Facebook! But, on the other hand, what are site owners to do if these kind of components aren't up to the task? (I've always wondered what *anyone* sees in Facebook though, aside from users already probably being there... it's about the *worst* forum experience there is.)

What's sad is that some of the best forum software has been around longer than WordPress or even the public Web. Why not just integrate stuff like phpBB if the WordPress eco-system can't create their own equally good alternative?

This is one of my little soap box things... stuff like comments and forum-like capabilities, IMO, should be fairly core concerns for WordPress, as with comments, nearly every site uses/needs them, and forum capabilities are certainly extremely common for any kind of community/membership type site. Maybe I don't know how Automattic works, but I'm always a bit confused why they don't push/fund the development of these areas a bit more.