I don't blame people for trying to come up with new forum paradigms instead of reimplementing the same solution over and over again.
Then again, forum software that implements modern expectations is never going to be basic.
Thankfully, as FluxBB is opensource, it can be forked and saved from this development direction.
That was danneu's point - that any forum that actually implements most of what people will want out of it (just to start with - separate subforums/categories, user permissions, tags, thread and user following, local and email alerts, broad formatting options, media embeds, per-user display settings, etc etc...) is going to be well beyond "basic" just to get a userbase in the first place.