Thank you for your reply. It is most informative.
a) The threads were long, meandering discussions and most posts held no useful information. I admit that I do find walking through someone else’s support call a bit tedious and painful. I believe there is a more suitable way to request, gather, organise and display this information;
b) Lots of ‘stub’ posts with no replies or resolutions which are kept visible, for some reason - The threads are also closed so they’re literally useless and just taking up space with no automatic removal or archival of dead or stub posts. and these are the ones that seem to show up in my searches most often. Maybe other people are just using different words?;
c) It may be the social aspect of the forum, but questions were not aggregated and only very basically organised into exclusionary categories, leading to separate but similar questions and missed solutions on different parts of the site;
d) There are so many redundant posts. As mentioned above, people use different terms for identical things, which makes searching for a previously asked question almost impossible unless you can think like someone else. This doesn’t seem to be taken into account by many admins (or devs?);
e) I thought that a more normalised dataset may help provide more consistent, current and appropriate information;
f) Automatic tagging so issues can be automatically assigned and allocated without tedious manual intervention, post husbandry and reorganisation;
Categories and tags are swings and roundabouts at this point, just different ways of doing, essentially, the same thing - it’s just semantic differences. Both are intended to segregate and separate information out for easier organisation and interrogation. I don’t think it matters which you use, TBH, as long as the Interface supports it’s use case.
g) There’s lots of unused screen space which could be used to display information. Currently, the page seems quite sparse and thin on functionality and easy access to common/recent/main features. On my screen, around 40-50% of the page is blank;
h) The date-based scrollbar to the right (in my experience) misses out the most recently dated replies/posts and doesn’t scroll fully;
I am sure these are all customisable and supported with the proper plug-ins as I have been advised, I just don’t see a lot of this type of thing about 
I will have a look at those plug-ins and see if they are being used, thank you again.
I will have a look at those plug-ins, too. Thank you.