Yep, I forgot about ForumNG.
Quite honestly, I don't think Moodle developers are necessarily ignoring forums and improvements, I really believe that this particular activity is a bit complex and is just taking a lot of effort to make improvements. For example, my feature request to add a calendar date was worked on, progressed, and then stopped. My guess is that it stopped because of the many connections where dates get used. There was probably some unanticipated problem that was encountered.