I imagine different webmasters would place importance of different features higher than others. What one webchick's gold is another webchick's trash, eh?
People forget what drives most site's popularity is good content. Bells and whistles will only get you a few visits, then it's off to the "next big thing". Excellence in content, good interesting conversation, etc. will draw and keep and audience.
As webmasters, site owners, whatever we choose to call ourselves, we must first of all consider the audience we are trying to reach. Do they really want that picture under their user name, or do they just want you to stop messing with the scripts so the site will stay up more than 3 days and not lose all their posts,
again. Users expect stability and reliability out of the forum software, they don't care what brand you are using, that it has some new-fangled twist that'll be sure and crash once people actually start showing up... just
work when they expect it to.
