[_ck_]

As far as I know, bbPress adds no special abilities or requirements to BuddyPress, it’s simply able to use the usertable directly, so you in theory should be able to use your phpbb solution with BuddyPress too.

You have to understand bbPress was never designed originally to deeply integrate into WordPress, only use the user-table. Deep integration was an afterthought – years after it was originally released and a mish-mash of legacy was established. Matt had a 180 degree turnaround on that process with bbPress 1.0 being rewritten to use BackPress instead. If WordPress ever is redesigned to use BackPress itself (don’t hold your breath, it could be years) deep integration could be even easier and much lighter weight.

I’m not saying this to be mean or unfair, but very simply, if you don’t like something you see in bbPress 1.0, don’t adopt it now thinking it will change sometime soon, it won’t and you’ll only be very disappointed. bbPress development is quite obviously NOT developed around user requests, it’s developed around Automattic requirements. It’s the exact same thing for WordPress and nothing new policy-wise. Everything else is left to plugin developers.

That said, I would stop using bbPress in heartbeat if they started throwing in many of the features that people are demanding be included as built in. I already have a big enough problem with many of the hardcoded “features” already.