I'm working on a new Drupal 5.x community site, one of the bug bears I have is with forums, doesn't everyone ;-)
Members, and likely most implementers, expect Forums to be able to sort more than just forum-topic node types, say, event and poll types and any type of node (I'll use loads of CCK node types) associated with the forums taxonomy. In my case, I'd also like to have all commenting to look the same, that is, forums should not be flat while other commenting is threaded, actually, all nodes and comments on the site should work the same.
Node types associated with the forum taxonomy should be easy to create from within the desired forum for members.
New posts icons or indicators should not discriminate between new nodes and new comments in nodes.
First, I started hacking (well, actually theme level and custom module overrides) the forum module. Then I thought, forums actually exist on three levels:
1. Forum Index
2. Topic List
3. Topic View