Hi @51mon.
I suspect part of the problem is metaphors. Anything one types will often be understood to the Author. However others may have difficulty understanding.
So… here goes:
Discourse Meta is designed at the core to be a base community framework.
It provides a basic foundation…That out the box kind of bland.
With your age group and mine you might have been involved or aware of Dos Electronic BBSes.
A fair number were derivatives of Telegard BBS aka Telegard Hacks. (drifting sideways…)
Back on track.
So you want to build a Discourse Meta forum for…
This is you starting point.. Sit down an figure out an idea of what your community’s purpose and what you want to have it offer in terms if function & features.
Then take 1 step back.
To get a clearer idea of where you can go. Explore the list of communities already using Discourse. Atm don’t have a link off hand. Checking out existing communities will give you an idea of what can be accomplished…Abd how similiar some communities are to how very different they can be in scope and function.
From here you can jot down features different communities have that you want in your community idea.
You can decide if you want paid hosting that can make quality if life easier or go full control and self host for total control of powerful extensibility of choosing whatever plugins you want. But at a cost of maintaining the vps yourself.
Either way you will need to research what you will need to have the functions and features available to design your community.
So from here let’s perform a thought experiment. Provide a sample community idea. We can even use an existing community and ask us what Customization > Plugin (if needed), Customization > Theme and Customization > Theme component would we need to accomplish what this community has?