I’m anxious to hear a response on this as well. I used bbpress for forums initially, but using that with BuddyPress it’s ugly as sin and there isn’t a forums directory page to display all the active forums (otherwise it did work). The interface for the forums inside BuddyPress looks very nice, but from sitewide forums, I couldn’t actually create any forums.
Options currently are:
a forum that works but is awful looking (bbpress)
a forum that looks nice but isn’t really working; at least ‘out of the box’ (BuddyPress)
