Ok, I must confess I hadn’t taken much a look into it before, so I assumed that what the new forum software was about was creating a new (with all that it entails) software specifically for Bitcointalk. If I’ve understood it properly, Epochtalk aims at being a forum enabler, thus upping the level of abstraction needed to develop the forum, and exponentially making the development tougher to implement that just a single specific instance for Bitcointalk.

If I’ve assessed the above correctly, the focus goes way beyond a Bitcointalk forum implementation, thus the suggestion for people to download the software and setup their own forum environment, being the test oriented to finding bugs, functional problems, usability issues and performance issues amongst others, of the underlying forum generator software (and not just a "mere" instance as I has in mind).