lol, so you can empathize with my plight, but don't feel it
more power to you, if you can get stuff for free. Getting kit for free is what TWG is founded on.
I've not solidified my list yet, but I've started looking for the easiest solutions. I don't relish the idea of interpreting Gallery and WordPress and SMF so that I can bridge them seamlessly, but once I've figured them out, it'd probably go faster than building on just one and building the rest. Xoops would be a good option, if there was any sort of comunity doing anything with it but redsigning the xoops site. The last xoops-wordpress bridge was written like, 3 years ago. There is no Xoops-SMF bridge, but it looks like they do have a recent forum plugin from more recently. Their gallery plugins leave either much to be desired or are of ancient date. And I don't really want to write a comic plugin from scratch for Xoops. So much potential, so little delivery. (They claimed a couple years to be rewriting from scratch to create "XoopSphere, but that seems dead like everything elses.
90% of developers working on WordPress are worried only about advertising revenue and SEO. While those are big issues, it doesn't contribute much to a complete site.
Developers at SMF seem more diverse of interest but don't want to work on anything but the forums
I haven't met any Gallery developers.
Maybe I should poke Jordo and we can develop one and sell it.