It is really unfortunate that wordpress and the current team which holds the reins of bbpress have both ignored bbpress development. The history of bbpress shows it to be an "ugly stepchild" where it is tolerated at best and ignored most of the time. Development has gone through herky jerky stops and starts spanning years and many months:

http://www.ohloh.net/p/bbpress/commits/summary

While other apps - for example muut which introduced their wp plugin recently - have taken the lead, bbpress has lagged behind and is continuing to fall more and more as development stalls.

This is very difficult for the typical user to understand. If you need more manpower, ask for it. If you need more resources, pipe up and say so! There is no question that many would rise up and answer the challenge to contribute and take an active role.

But that requires the current "powers that be" to first acknowledge this and to ask for help. They are refusing to do that for the moment and as such they are part of the problem, not the solution.

What is more astonishing is that they even refuse to acknowledge existing shortcomings of bbpress which are so obvious to everyone else! An example of this is the flat out refusal to even consider that permalinks are broken:

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/any-way-to-eliminate-redundancyweirdness-in-permalinks-i-e-forumsforum/

Hope this changes as bbpress has much unrealized potential.