BuddyPress.org

Yeah, the command line conversion is a barrier for a lot of people, as they either don’t have command line access, or if they do, gettext is not installed on the server.

You can find some alternate ways to generate .mo files here:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Translating_WordPress

Also, there is no bp-custom.php file by default. You just create it as a new file, and put it directly in the plugins folder. BuddyPress will automatically check there for it.

Yeah, it’s a bit of work to change strings, but anything simpler would likely not be upgrade-proof, or would be much slower.