jjj will respond when he has a chance, but I’ll say he does 3 different jobs so he doesn’t always have time to respond right away.
He is an Automattic employee where his full time role is head of “social”. bbPress and BuddyPress are his other projects that he does on the side.
I encourage you, when you have time, to listen to a recent interview with jjj http://wpcandy.com/broadcasts/community-interviews/002-john-james-jacoby – you’ll get an idea of just how much work he has on his plate – frankly I don’t know how he does it.
Both bbPress and BuddyPress are maintained by volunteers like jjj and myself. We contribute and help out as much as possible, but ultimately projects that “pay the bills” come first.
I’ll let jjj give his point of view, but I can tell you with 99% certainty that there is no easy way to make bbPress 2.x look like bbPress.org – they are simply two completely different platforms. bbPress 2.x was a total rewrite of bbPress, from the ground up, so that bbPress could be a plugin instead of a stand alone install.
And yes, when bbPress.org is upgraded – whenever that time comes – it will adopt the new bbPress 2.x look. I understand that some people like the 1.x look better however that all comes down to personal preference – personally I like the 2.x look but that’s my preference.
Googling for bbPress themes and plugins is hit or miss but is going almost be a miss if you are using 2.x. It’s been out only a year, so the vast majority of what you find is going to be for 1.x. Recently there has been quite a few nice plugins popping up that are for 2.x – you can find these in the WordPress.org plugin repository
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=bbpress
bbPress is actually quite well documented, however right now most of the documentation is in the actual code. Writing up documentation takes a lot of time and effort – WordPress.org codex is a perfect example – it’s fantastic but it is also maintained by 100s of contributors.
I’m sure jjj could spend some time writing documentation, but then none of the bugs that come in would be addressed in a timely manner, none of the features that people are constantly asking for would ever get written. Every comes down to volunteers – we just don’t have enough. Anyone with a user account can write and contribute documentation for bbPress so i think it’s unfair to expect jjj to do that on top of the dozens of other things he already does.
I do know that when 2.1 is released, which should be fairly soon, we are going to add some stuff to the bbP codex, however it’s night going to be something that appears overnight.
I’m not sure what you mean by “better standard theme” – the theme that ships with bbPress 2.x works well – the one that ships with the upcoming 2.1 is even better. Logistically it’s impossible to ship with a bbPress theme that fits everyones needs and works with all WordPress theme, but we try to make it as compatible as possible.
bbPress does a lot of great things “out of the box”. However it comes to a point that when certain customizations are needed you are either going to have to get your hands dirty with code or hire a developer to assist you – and that’s just the nature of the beast – for any open source project.
If you are looking for a forum application that has 100s of contributors, many of which focus on the project full time, then unfortunately bbPress may not be the best fit for you. Vanilla, phpBB, along with others are some great alternatives.
