BuddyPress.org

I like the potential buddypress offers and am very appreciative.
I think the reason many buddypress sites seem to fail is a general lack of cohesiveness though. There are a lot of dead end links that only the most die hard fans will work around.
For example, I click on “following” and get a generic message “you are not following anyone yet” with no links to find members or add stuff to follow. I click on groups and get “Sorry, there was no activity found. Please try a different filter.” with absolutely on direction on how to make a group. I go to profile/friends and get absolutely no direction on how to find and make friends. Messages has no drop down to pick from friends, just a free form @ type in, which most people will have no clue how to message friends. Settings and Profile/Edit are odd separately, no real good menu name to give these separate partial profile edit places.
I do really like buddypress and am just meaning the issues I have trying to get non techie geeks to use it. It has a lot of dead ends with generic “nothing matches that filter” without default direction on what to do to make it useful.
It would be even more amazing if when you clicked on a dead end link, like friends, instead of saying no friends and then nothing, gave options to give people a link to all members, a search box to find friends, etc. On forums, instead of just “you have’t started any topics”, it would be nice to list all the forums and have a link to add a topic, much like this site.
I guess I’m still trying to figure out how the default buddypress install relates to this site and why it seems like an empty shell of what it could be, content aside. The menus are empty.
So many things clicked and just dead ends. I see the potential is amazing though with amazing coders, it’s just not user friendly for people who can handle only 3 levels of nothing without clear links what to do next.