In reply to Colin Spencer.

I don't think the Team removed the visual editor, it's just disabled by default. http://codex.bbpress.org/enable-visual-editor/ but really, you shouldn't have to touch any code to turn the Visual editor back on, it should be controlled on a per user basis, like WordPress does it.

Actually, I found the ticket that describes why it was removed. You can read it here https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/1967 maybe we can revisit the ticket to see if there are still issues and it can be re-instated.

I guess the nomenclature used in bbPress is not new but it's just different from what I'm used to. I come from a phpBB2 and vBulletin background and they both use similar terms to describe things. There are definitely some things as I mentioned in the post that would help the new user experience.