Hey CK! Long time, no see! And thanks for all of your contributions to the original bbPress ecosystem.

There's always going to be a special place in my heart for bbPress 1.x, and BackPress. These two projects were the most optimized, as far as all of the sister-projects go, and still to this day power large swaths of WordPress.org.

I don't think it's fair to place all of the blame on Matt, though I understand how and why that's easy to do, especially when your opinion has not been the popular vote either time.

The choice to move bbPress to BackPress was, I think, an obvious one in 2007/8. BackPress was the future, and until WordPress became hugely successful and backwards compatibility became paramount, WordPress was on course to get the same heart transplant. It wasn't until it became clearly obvious that breakage would occur and most everyone agreed that the BackPress dependency exponentially increased the barrier to entry that the shift away from BackPress happened, and bbPress lost its legs again.

Consider, though, that bbPress is WordPress's moon in this scenario. It took the BackPress bullet so that WordPress didn't have to, and for that I think bbPress (and Sam Bauers' work at the time) is hugely responsible for the current success of the WordPress platform, even if it isn't ever championed as such. bbPress showed everyone first hand how much work it was just to get back to square one again. Why bother doing the same to WordPress?

In 2010, it was very clear that WordPress is the hub of our ecosystem, and everything else is a spoke. The decision to move bbPress to be a WordPress plugin, at that time, is another obvious one. The overlapping systems (I.E. BackPress) are abandonware, and there's no sense in trying to Frankenstein everything together anymore. Rather, the decision was to rebuild bbPress with everything we had learned since 2005, to take advantage of everything new that WordPress got and BackPress did not.

* Is bbPress the plugin bloated?
I don't think any more-so than a stand-alone version would be if it were trying to keep up with WordPress's current functionalities, or other forum software.

* Is bbPress the plugin confusing to users looking for forums?
I don't think so, since the problem it's solving now is specifically "forums for WordPress" rather than "forums so fast you'll freak."

* Could bbPress be something great had BackPress or pluginizing it never occurred?
No, to be quite blunt. If demand were there or if it was really as awesome as we remember it, anyone could have forked old bbPress to resurrect it, but it didn't (and likely will never) happen, because porting WordPress's improvements would take a lifetime.

* What's my personal stance on bbPress?
I loved 0.9. I love 1.2. I love 2.x. They're all great, and fun to work on, and rewarding, and incredibly satisfying to tinker with. I will always enjoy the thought of a BackPress powered internet vs. a WordPress one, but that's not where we are today. 10 years from now, when a RESTful WordPress has sites talking back & forth to each other, it may be possible to do the BackPress heart transplant we couldn't do 10 years prior, but that's highly unlikely.

Automattic has a funny way of taking the long way around and having it work out. In many ways, the current incarnation of WordPress.com is very much what BuddyPress was in 2008. Central activity stream, Notifications, Settings, Followers, etc... It's no surprise, then, that a company lead by Matt and projects lead by Matt should operate similarly. The long-long-games for WordPress, bbPress, BuddyPress, and Automattic separately as a company (and Jetpack), are incredibly optimistic and collectively are gunning to be an operating system for the World Wide Web; the connective tissue that keeps people communicating and congregating, and if bbPress needed to take a few hits along the way to make all of that possible, I'm okay with that, because I think it still has a bright future ahead of it, and will continue to be the forum software of choice for people already using WordPress.

I know it's unlikely I'll ever sway you to put as much passion into bbPress 2.x as you did 0.x, but I'd personally love it if you did. You had dozens of plugins and had contributed hugely in the beginning, and whether or not you feel it, I for one consider your early commitment and enjoyment of the bbPress platform to be incredibly inspiring.