Re: users complaining
@erich73; Personally, I love the Activity stream, as long as a lot of the activities are removed (dumb stuff like, “Fred just did something”, “Mary coughed 2 hours and 47 seconds ago”, etc). With Groups and Members shown first, and Activity renamed to something like Conversations, most ordinary users can cope with it. Out of the box it’s scarier than a gang of axe-wielding clowns on acid!
You feel it isn’t possible to create a proper social network with BuddyPress, and while I agree to a point, it’s the best we have so far, it seems. We struggled with Elgg for some weeks, but gave up on it. The team and community are wonderful (as here), but it’s TOO open, has no real user controls of the required kind, and creating a site that looks like a site takes forever in hard slog coding. Pligg came close, but needed far too much work to turn into a BuddyPress-like tool, and most others have fallen by the wayside or cost a packet. For those without funding, BuddyPress certainly seem to be the best of the bunch, but HECK does it need redesigning. (But it won’t be, of course, because that would cause all the plugins to fail… *sigh*)
Oh, and I tried Mingle for WP too. Wonderfully simple, and Categories could be used for Groups, sort of. But… it fails miserably with most WP themes, or at least the ones I tried for alteration within a reasonable time scale, ie., some time before the world ends in 2012. 
