Amen! I do hold out hope as there are flickers that communities are still on the radar. I can’t recall exactly when/where but I know a few months back there was discussion and some seeming progress, perhaps in one of the regularly recorded developers meetings? Then of course everything pivoted to the most recent hardfork, etc. and I haven’t heard much since. I just hope there’s at least one person on Blocktrades team pushing communities forward!

I think the original design specs were even more ambitious than your summary, incorporating who could view community content as well as post it. Truly private communities using encryption/memo keys would be incredible and along with automated beneficiary percentages for community content and things like the new recurring transfers feature enable a completely decentralized Patreon replacement!