No, early is not at all.
It's never early, it's always late no matter what.
Actually, if something worth comes out of a similar discussion, 2.0 is quite a good spot to fill it in since nothing has settled yet (and actually I am working on something related to this that made me wanted to start this discussion ).
Yeah, that could be a start, though I would really like to try to go a bit further.
But let's start with them.
As a reference I'll use the corresponding communities, since I'm not so familiar with them and I don't know many sites using tìhem either.
Flarum
https://discuss.flarum.org/
First impression: looks like a ripoff of gmail.
Darn Elk NEED a "paste => create attachment" feature, because nowadays it's a pain to have to create a file to attach an image.
I've just revisited my priorities and if I'm able to I'll fit it into 1.1.7 xD
That doesn't mean I dislike it, just trying to "categorize" what I'm seeing.
I like the "start a discussion" button and probably also the "reply" button that may be where the "log in to reply" is when logged in and inside a discussion.
Discourse
Quite minimalist.
It took me a few seconds understand what "top" was about, at first I thought it was a button to bring me back to the top when I was scrolling, but since it disappeared when I moved down I realized it was something different.
The "categories" page is a mixture of an old-style board-index and flarum (boards with description on the left and latest topics on the right).
These indeed are different from we have now, sure, though they are not really that much different, in a way. I mean, it's both basically a "recent topics" page instead of the board index (that you can already do with base 1.1 from the layout page), of course a little nicer (that may not be so good with just tweaking the CSS of the above mentioned view).
What I'm thinking here would be something more substantial, not only a view, but also a change of features presented to the user.
TBH, when I wrote about it the first time, I was looking at linkedin "home" page, but probably what would be more similar to what I had in mind would be twitter:
that doesn't mean I would pick everything they have there and just replicate it.
Though, a ripoff of twitter home page seems more "forumish" to me than Flarum at this point: a central "stream" of most recent posts, a trends area, something else "to do" (if you like and if someone could figure out what that else could be xD). Heck, even the menu on the left could be an interesting solution to explore, even though that would mean break quite a bit more than what I was proposing here... but who cares at this stage, collecting ideas is different from making them reality anyway.
Yep, people are really lazy.
I'm wondering: would it be better posts or topics? You mentioned both, and in fact I would be unsure myself.
Posts seem like a good way, though it could make sense also topics, in that case I guess a badge with the number of unread messages since your last visit would be a nice touch.
Actually, the answer may even depend on the traffic of the site, looking at discourse and flarum, I have the feeling that if the site is kind of busy, you may keep getting these "new post" thing quite frequently if you are not fast to catch up (well, okay, nowadays it's less of a concern, though let's consider possibilities while we dream ).
Yeah, as both you and @radu81 said... Disqus is just a comments platform as a service, not really a "forum".
Truth there are shared features and a forum could act as commenting solution for things, though two different planets, really.
I'd be tempted to consider the up/down voting part, and probably that would be more interesting as a sort of "reactions" that could give more freedom of expression (e.g. in some less-confrontational communities, someone maybe be scared of straight downvote someone else's post, though he may be good with a less direct reaction (e.g. a frown or a shrug), but these could be used internally to up/down vote posts anyway without people actually realizing ).
Another wall of text. LOL