Wow, surprised to see this thread just died?
I am currently using Discourse for a community just starting: https://community.americanradioclub.com
It is a community of ham radio operators. I started the community on Discourse, and I really love the snappiness and power, scalability (I am on track for 150k members by end of year).
However, it lacks the social-network style features I would like from a bbpress + buddypress installation, which would also be nice because it would make my site fully wordpress for a more coherent user experience.
I wonder how everyone else’s experience went?