Hi Chris.
Yeah this is an interesting challenge.
It is far from straightforward I suspect as you are combining the functionality of the discovery route with the topic route. It’s not a simple reskin of either.
BUT, I have actually recently been looking at how one might extend the Babble chat plugin to do something similar but couldn’t dedicate enough time from paid work. Essentially this would be adding Topic support to Babble.
I’d definitely be interested in discussing my agency Pavilion picking this up so long as the results were open source (the plugin extensions that is, not necessarily any additional theming)
Do you have a budget in mind? To set your expectations this could be quite involved and far beyond a theming exercise. Happy to take the discussion offline.