What’s up Discoursers!
Andrei here from Discountalk.
I am probably only days (not even a week I think) into Discourse and I am absolutely loving it!
Some background; I have been developing websites and blogs for years now side hobbies with a semi-serious attitude (not a developer or coder myself) and I can tell you Discourse is light years in front of some of the other software platforms.
I’d been thinking about a discount type of directory for about a year or two now and when I hit the go button with Wordpress it was a nightmare. A killed it instantly before I got too deep.
That’s when I started to look at my options and decided I would go with more of a discussion and community platform to solve the same problem instead of the old school directory method for what I wanted to achieve (time will tell if this was a good decision or not).
I briefly looked at some Wordpress options (BB Press), Reddit style clones and other types of traditional forum software until finally settling on Discourse.
I’d been using Discourse for some time as a user over at the SAFE net forum and so knew it well from a user perspective and really enjoyed using it so after browsing “forum software” on Google one Sunday morning and noticing it just stood out like a glorious champion stallion flanked by donkeys I decided what the hell. It sure as heck looked and behaved a lot better than most other discussion forum software and websites I had used before and was lightning fast.
Literally hours after making the decision I was almost up an running. From my experience this is nothing short of Amazing.
Shout out to @frabrunelle he has put it together for me, organised my Vultr servers, email forwarding and everything else, I am not sure he does this as a gig or not or even if he is OK with me saying this but if you need any work done on your current DC or looking to get a DC site setup give him a holler he is a bit of a whiz kid.
So time will tell if my idea will take off but in a nut shell as a non-techy I have no complaints so far and only praise for Discourse 
P.S. also wanted to add I think the fact that DC requirements around database and cache etc force people to use a superior hosting model is a great decision.