Re: I gave buddypress a try
There is a long way to go, but now that bbPress is tightly integrated in BP, forum support is emerging. Etiviti (rich!)’s new “Forum Extras” plugin that is a big leap toward bringing classic bbPress plugins into the BP environment, and it’s getting better every day. Forum attachments is another great plugin that brings a classic forum feature into the BP environment.
There are some core limitations of bbPress that will keep it from being as “powerful” as PHPBB, such as the ability to merge threads, but whether those features are critical or even desirable is open to debate. (Moderators love that feature but I am not sure users do.)
I hope it’s not true that forums are “minimized on purpose” around these parts, because what you have built is a perfect fit with forums. Forums are the heritage of web-based “social networking”, and there are a lot of important social interactions that still lend themselves quite well to the forum structure (such as this thread you are reading right now, for example).
Like that hybrid commercial on TV right now: Forums were social before Facebook even existed or YouTube uploaded its first video. 
