It would be interesting if this covered another use case:
This great but poorly marketed plugin gives people control over topics they create, so they can track content like DIY projects and so on. Other users can comment on the threads but their comments are reduced in scope so its folded beneath each entry.
It would be cool if your plugin could pull from multiple entries in the same thread, not just a top level image. In other words, to build the portfolio, it might use all of the images from one thread, or only the first and last entries, and so on.