Hmm… last night, the bbpress “latest discussion” links did not have the “replies” bit. This morning they sure do though.
Interesting point about the RSS feeds. Because each post does not have its own URL, I guess this is a way to simulate it. Still, it seems there should be a “pretty” option for that as well. Something like:
http://example.com/topic/1/post/3
Instead of:
http://example.com/topic/1?replies=3
I may explore this with some mod_redirect rules and a little code hacking. Any bbpress devs around that can chime in? In my experience with Google (and others), it’s notably easier to get URLs like the first example above indexed.