@merefield, first off… thanks for the amazing plugin 
I just wanted to also report that the “topic list default thumbnail fallback” setting does not seem to be working. I’ve set this as our “topic list default thumbnail” but any topic that does not have an image, is not using this fallback image, as illustrated here:
Is there a solution to get the default image to show? I miss the congruence when there was an image or default image for each topic.
One other note… the thumbnails used to show animated GIF’s which we loved. But now it seems it just displays a still shot for the thumbnail, instead of the animated GIF.
One other note: we are also using the Pavilion Events Plugin, which @davidkingham mentioned they are also using.