What I would like to do, is try to see if I can find a budget host for Discourse, where we could just play around with it. Create user accounts, let people here click into it and post so they can get familiar with it, etc.
There are so many similar things between the two software, it's just setup differently.
And like I mentioned in my Global Mods post (which I don't think you saw yet,) I started working on a list last night of all the add-on's and features we typically use here, and not only are most, if not all are able to be recreated on the new platform, many of them are inherent to the software.
No nickel and dime bullshit; it's built-in or offered as official plug-in's. No finding something cool only to have 2Hot2Trot decide he doesn't want to support his own mod living in his mama's basement.