There's definitely a lot of good suggestions on the list, no doubt. One big obstacle I think that we need to consider when making suggestions though, is that the admins/devs are probably trying to save as much memory as possible(due to the huge number of content being created per day) and decrease as much server load(that's why they disabled user statistics).

And also, things you can do with SMF are probably very limited(or probably needs to be developed from scratch). Not like other forum software whereas you could just install a plugin and you're good to go.