Great feedback from everyone on this so far. A couple things to note about the templates/site integration stuff.
Templates would first be introduced on a small scale, probably like showflat/showthreaded. This way everyone can see the direction they are going and make suggestions and give feedback before doing a bunch of the scripts.
Site integration will lean on using WWWThreads within other parts of the site. Like a couple of the posts suggested being able to have articles on pages within your site that have feedback forms that go with them. Calendars would be a possibility as I have some code from a personal script I use that would work well for this. Polls. Emailing replies to forums. These would come a little at a time as I don't want to spend the next 6 months just working on site integration because then other areas start to lag behind.
No matter which comes first it won't affect the other. Site integration won't require much modification of existing scripts as it would me a bunch of addon type scripts so it won't make templates any harder to do when it's time to do that. Working on templates first wouldn't make it any harder to do site integration later.
