One aspect not mentioned by anyone as far as I can tell: I think that a forum-based bug tracker must allow subscribing to a single thread not the entire forum as it is in the forum now.
As someone who submits a bug, I want to get any followups and discussion about bugs I submitted but I do not want to get the entire bug-related traffic.
Of course, an option to subscribe to the entire forum should remain. However, even developers may want to reduce the traffic, so another feature to consider is subscribing to specific category of posts (in terms of bugs this would be, for example, moodle components).
May be Moodle should have two different forum-type modules, a basic one, the forum module as we have now more or less to be used further for normal class discussions, and an advanced one with thread-level subscription, sticky stuff, meta data and so on. The latter could be used for more specialized discussions, bug tracking, and support.
General developer forum
New Bug Tracker
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