Feature Request: Static Index Page

I’ve been running a self-hosted Discourse instance for the last three months and have quickly come to love the customization options, the flexibility, and the overall forgiveness built into Discourse.
After running other forums for two decades I can easily say that Discourse is one of the best forum softwares I’ve ever used.

My discourse is dedicated to a fandom of artists and writers who formerly had a home on a “booru board”; A simple image board that featured tagging, comments, a favorites list, and not much else.
Many of our users have also come to love Discourse and accept the differences in how the two types of website operate. But many of them are still dissatisfied that we don’t have a simple static paged index that can be perused in the way that they’re used to.

I’m quite certain it’s possible to create such an index, but before I pay someone to code this for me I thought it might be wise to check with the good people here to see if someone might have already done such a thing.

What we’re looking for is:

  • Pages rather than infinite scroll, 25-50 thumbnails per page
  • Locations of the artwork or stories relative to one another don’t change in the index
  • Can be displayed “oldest first” or “newest first”
  • Ability for users to choose to see the Index as their main page rather than New or Latest

If someone has already done this with their Discourse, I would love to know about it.
If someone might be willing to create a plugin to make this possible, please message me and we can discuss payment.

Thank you for your time.