The forum has already made it clear that account recover is of less priority for them and thus it can take time. You will have to follow the same route like other members.
So far as improving the security of the forum is concerned, that involves a lot of work. Consider one person fighting against thousands of hackers to tackle this. No matter how much improvement is done to security features, there is always some chance of account hack happening.
Lots of work? All we need is an account changes confirmation email and it would have solved and prevented all of it. It isn't "lots of work" either, literally every single forum board software includes it as a default security feature from PHPBB, VB, MYBB etc. and yes even Simple Machines.
If recovery isn't a priority then why waste users time and forum thread space making a shitty post asking users to PM staff only to not hear from them after months later as seen in many posts throughout META? Again seems lazy and inefficient, I understand that admins have duties and possibly lack manpower but to put their users account security last or just completely disregard it, is unacceptable.