That’s different. You said you could start wordpress and post something. I’m saying that you can start Discourse and post something. Making a blog that people will stick around on is also more complicated than posting something. Maybe the analogy doesn’t work.
And as someone who’s made their living with Discourse for almost a decade and can’t do the simplest of tasks in Wordpress, I might not be a good person to ask!
But yeah, everything on your list is pretty hard (figuring out how many emails a particular person wants? And if the moderator is mad about getting notifications you might need a new moderator–if they’re doing their job and being online all the time, they won’t get many because they’ll see them in their browser, but it’s pretty easy for them to adjust that and for a new forum the default is to send lots of email so that the people know the site exists, and lots of those things are hard because they are hard problems, not because Discourse makes them hard.
Automated nudges? At the right times? That’s pretty hard.
That’s my bread and butter! But even when you have access to the data (and you don’t until you figure out how to scrape it from Facebook, I’m pretty sure, and is that even legal?) it’s still complicated. I’m cleaning up a mess now from someone doing a bad job on a migration and making all the users mad.
Yes! That’s much harder. Everyone has expectations and even the things that are horrible about a given system people will be mad when they are missing!
So, while I’m likely irrationally defensive on behalf of Discourse and there are some things that could be easier, to me, much of what you’re trying to do is just plain hard, regardless of the platform you’re trying to configure.