Have you asked the ithemes support folks? I thought I came across something about a conflict there a while back but I may be wrong. I use wordfence for security and it works really wel, they responded to a problem their plugin was causing with BP right away offered a work around and then a fix.
There should be a media or gallery tab which shows the media uploaded by user on their profile page at least that is how it works with rtmedia on my site.
You may want to consider alternatives that are compatible. There are BP compatible options for all the plugins you mention. For example I use wise chat plugin for chat.
Media press is a BP compatible image upload plugin. Might help yourself to look around some more.
If you go to appearance > menu and click screen options in the upper right corner then check the buddypress option from the list of checkboxes it will add buddypress specific menu for profile, login, logout and others.
I looked at WP rocket and they don’t list any object caching in there feature list so that would really solve the issue with not using W3 total cache. My host only allows memcache on dedicated server not VPS. So still trying to find alternative.
@djpaul do you have recommendation for object caching. Pretty much had turned chachingnof becausing from what I was reading didn’t work well for BP. Running on VPS which can be configured to run Php xcache.
In addition to the two already mentioned Buddypress activity plus is another option it has 10000 active installs. Was the first one I tried though I settled on the afore mentioned Rtmedia
The way to to it is to make the first forum for your group a category forum. Ex MY GROUP FORUM then make subsequent forums standard and set the first one as the parent. That should accomplish what you want to do.
I have used buddyblog which requires BP simple front end post from the same developer and I have also used User Blog They have different interfaces but function similarly.
I think you can do that by creating a custom menu with the profile, message and notification links then using the custom menu widget to place in the side. Use the screen options fold out on the admin >appearance >menu page to make the Buddypress profile, notifications etc menu links visible.
