Title, category & body are required in our internal forum.
In some cases tags are required too & some fields don’t become available until you’ve filled in the fields before them. For instance, I can’t type body text before I’ve chosen a category.
But the blue ‘Create Topic’ button is still available. Out of curiosity I clicked it to see what would happen. Boy, was that a mistake!
OK, I’m not sure what is being reported here? The behavior looks correct to me?
If you’d like to “style down” the warnings on your Discourse instance from red to another friendlier color, make the font smaller, hide the 
glyph, etc, that can be done with CSS overrides in Admin, Customize.
Can’t speak for @ganncamp but the annoyance that jumps out to me is that the character count warning shouldn’t be continually reappearing after dismissed each time you type an additional character.
Yes, it’s that the character count warning on the body field not only reappears for each character, but that it vibrates.
I could deal with it coming back if it didn’t dance around angrily (i.e. in red) pulling my eye away from what I’m trying to do to comply with its demands.
FWIW I am a big fan of this plugin that counts down the number of characters remaining as someone types in the composer box:
OK, thanks for that clarification @ganncamp I’ve updated the title to make it more clear. And @downey I have no appetite for minimum character counters. That implies the minimum is OK, all you need is the minimum. I believe users should strive to do more than type the minimum when they communicate … we believe in the power of the paragraph ¶ here!
Hey! Check out the attached video, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Basically, if you try to create a topic with a short title, it prompts an error - but then it re-prompts it on each keystroke. So it actually blocks the input window. And jiggles annoyingly)