I had been using a PunBB MusicBrainz forum for many years and when the Discourse MetaBrainz forum replaced it, I was very sceptical.
It looked overly modern to my taste. Too much white colour all over the place.
But I was surprised that for a modern forum, it worked very very well in my good old Opera 12 and in a matter of a couple of days I was completely convinced and I find it very handy to use!
And I have always loved Markdown syntax but none of the forums I was on was using it before Discourse. It is a pleasure to use.
Most of all, it works so very well in a multitude of platforms for such a complex layout.
It must be very hard to maintain, or what?