Clearly links that don’t function isn’t normal; if everyone had this issue, 200k other bbPress users wouldn’t be using bbPress. Sorry if bbPress didn’t do what you expected, but it’s working great for many others.
Overall, it sounds like your theme is the culprit, and that you don’t like the way it looks. That’s a design decision; one that you will need to solve on your own if you don’t like the default styling.
bbPress has never tried to be exactly like “all the other forum software.” The philosophy is to be the smallest and simplest to use, and I think it accomplishes that pretty well inside of WordPress. If it’s missing things you wanted or expected, you are free to build those things yourself.
Thanks for the feedback.
