For those wanting stuff for the average user to get excited about, the blogs will be a small bit of that (like I said, it's not going to be very full featured to start). The UI overhaul will be a bigger chunk of that.
Complexity should be handled a bit better as well. When I mentioned inline help for the admin area, that will probably be available to the general user as well. Most everything, we plan to have a little ? or some other small link that will be clickable to explain a feature in some type of popup/lightbox, without cluttering the page.
In the end however, we'll always be a forum first. We'll never be a facebook/myspace/flavor-of-the-month-social-networking-site mimic
Since 7.0 has come out, we've spent the time getting the main features we need put in, at least in a basic capacity. Once we get blogs done, then we'll have all of the real main features that we need in place, galleries, new permission system, blogs, payment system.
Then we can start to extend on those after the UI is in. The user's profile page is going to become their little hub that will have blogs, user photo galleries, ability for others to leave comments, reciprocal buddies/friends. All permission based.
