We ship with defaults we think would work for most communities (but if every community was the same we wouldn’t need settings at all). Is there anything specific you’re looking to accomplish with settings? For example, if your community members are the type of people interested in badges, we have a topic full of ideas for custom badge queries: What cool badge queries have you come up with?
That aside, the key is always going to be your content and your people… there are a lot of very successful forums using very bad software!
One way to keep people involved is to get to know them a little… a lot of forums start a topic for introductions… or forum staff could post “icebreaker” topics that are asking the community to answer a specific question (maybe once a week at the same time so people come back looking for it?)… for a flight sim community maybe it’s something like… “what’s your favorite flight path?” (I’m not sure if that’s actually a good question, but hopefully you get the idea).