Personally, I like the threads in chronological order as is. Having them jump around based on reply date, I don't see an advantage. Collapsing threads would be nice. Keeping an audit trail of edited messages would eliminate the flame problem but might take up a lot of space, though I don't know that people would be editing all that much. AT any rate, I agree that setting features based on what the worst of the user population might do isn't necessarily the best way to go. Searching is my biggest complaint. I keep hearing that MySQL is a real database but see little evidence of it in the way most of these sites implement searching. Just some simple options to search multiple words with and/or would be a great help. There is simply too much material here in the forums and freestuff not to have a decent search facility.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken