I’ve been saying forever that Discourse can be used to solve a wide range of problems. That’s part of its strength, but it’s also overwhelming. Discourse (the business) should identify common use cases and develop templates for each of them.
With that in place, your research could have been reduced to signing up for a free trial on Discourse’s hosting and selecting the most appropriate “type of community” from a list of available community types that was shown on the Setup Wizard. If you didn’t find a template that matched your use case, and didn’t want to deal with a “give me all the bells and whistles” option, you’d have been able to quickly decide that Discourse wasn’t a good fit for your community.
It’s been a while since I signed up for a trial site, so if something close to what I’m suggesting has been implemented, just ignore this post.