I'm glad that people are interested!
Wouldn’t it be better if Bitcointalk provided a common test environment that was open for anybody to use, without people having to download the software and setting up their own environments?
beta.bitcointalk.org was run for a couple of years, but virtually nobody used it. It was too boring. I'd ideally like people to actually try using Epochtalk for various things that they find fun/interesting. Maybe try a more restrictive moderation style, maybe make it more niche-focused, maybe try adding some crazy features, etc. If people actually try to use it for real things, then the real deficiencies will be found.
Is the
requirements doc up to date? Seems quite vague in some parts, e.g. trust.
No, that's very old.