Thanks! And yes, definitely, I am a big believer in perfect being the enemy of good. I have to say, though, that the way things are presented in the Discourse admin make it easy to fall in the “perfect” trap.
Thinking about this this morning, I was asking myself what would help steer me, as a new admin, towards a “good enough” setting. What’s missing for me is a clear sense of hierarchy and priority in the different “dimensions” I need to think about as a community builder. Maybe this exists and I haven’t found it, but maybe something like a high-level “inventory” of the features and functionalities that make a community, where I can indicate what’s important and less important to me, and then be offered a somewhat prepackaged collections of settings to implement.
An example to try and make my thinking clear (maybe I need to think about this more and develop this idea in a different post). On a fresh install, I could have a checklist which asks me how important various aspects of the community are going to be:
- structuring content with tags or categories, or both
- allowing members to interact through chat
- the visual design
Realising as I write this that it isn’t very clear, I need to think more about it to present my idea in a way that’s comprehensible. I think what I have in mind is a kind of setup wizard which speaks in “user stories” (using quotes because it’s probably not exactly that) rather than technical settings, and helps me translate them into settings. Maybe there could even be an AI chatbot that helps parse my natural language explanations and is designed to guide me and keep me on track of this “simple configuration” I need to get started, and who has access to the settings or can surface them for me. Ask Discourse does some of this I guess…
(OK will think more and come back!)
This is very much how I have always intended to do things – however, my difficulties are really already just in getting to this minimum viable community platform, considering the nature and needs of my community. I do like your idea of beta testers, which wasn’t formulated so clearly in my mind – and of having a dedicated theme to test new components, that’s not something I’d thought of doing.
The one thing that puts a lot of pressure IMHO is that I know there will be a lot of resistance in moving off Facebook, and for a lot of members, the first minutes they set foot in the “new Discourse community” are going to make or break it. So I do have to make sure the minimum viable community doesn’t prevent roadblocks to onboarding and use compared to Facebook, otherwise users will come, look around, and stick around on Facebook, which will not be helpful for my goal of migrating.
The community on Facebook is very well-oiled and efficient. It also has a lot of complexity behind the scenes to give our members this experience. We also have the pressure that we are literally, at times, dealing with life-or-death situations with our members pets. The subject matter is highly sensitive and very much linked to immediate real-world consequences. So that is also something I take into consideration. If the technical aspects of participating in the community are too much of a barrier for our members, animals will suffer and die – not all, of course, but that is the endgame. And our benchmark for ease of community participation is facebook.
To be clear, if what I say above about our role concerns anyone: I know we can’t “save everybody” 
and pet owners have veterinarians. But we are the francophone ressource for a niche illness – including for many veterinarians, who send their clients to us, and join our community themselves. We are not “just” a “shared interest” community, not that there is anything wrong with that, or that any community, whatever its subject matter, doesn’t have real important impact on the lives of its members. And I’m aware this does colour the way I see my role and responsibility as a community builder/founder/manager. (So we don’t go down any rabbit-holes: I have a therapist , and I’ve been rather successfully grappling with the questions of implication and responsibility and what to let go of regarding this community for eight years now 
.)
Thanks a lot for your kind and thoughtful message, which has helped me identify more clearly what I have missed in my “admin experience” so far, and is giving me ideas to work around that and get it in a different way 