Re: Is the approach to bbPress-plugin + BuddyPress integration up for debate?
There are a few possible approaches to integrating them together, and the ones you need are possible even today. That’s actually exactly how bbPress works in the WordPress plugin repository, attaching plugins to tags in essence giving them their own ‘forum’ in a sense.
The first iteration will probably closely mirror how things work today, for the sake of it being an easy transition for everyone’s existing data. The last thing we want to happen is to force anyone to make changes to their existing setups. In future iterations we’ll include some options on how you want to configure them to communicate to each other. This may be strongly theme dependent though, since all of these components would need to have the proper hooks and CSS in place to style these elements correctly in any of the places they might appear.