At this point I can't believe any of us used Hive(Steem) before Communities. I feel like they were a critical element that makes this whole thing work in terms of the social layer.
That said, there is still a TON of untapped potential with communities and I wanted to share some ideas about a few features that I think would make running a Community a lot more powerful and effective. Some of these I've written about before so I'll be repeating those ideas as I've found that to be a pretty effective method of getting ideas into the hands of people actually capable of executing them.
Content Organization
As a Community owner I'd like the ability to organize the content in my communities into their own separate pages. I've written more about this feature in this post
Collections: A feature suggestion for PeakD
Here I was suggesting this as a feature for PeakD, but I think any Hive frontend would benefit from it obviously. I only suggested it to PeakD because they're the most responsive to user feedback.
Anyway the short version is the Community owner can create pages, name them whatever they want and mark posts to show up on those pages. In a Community like OnChainArt an example of some of these pages could be
- Featured
- Community Announcements
- Contests
I think this would be a huge help for community owners and give them a powerful tool to be able to make their communities more engaging.
Tag Filters
This is something first suggested by 
This is basically a community being able to specify for example 10 relevant tags in the community and suggesting those tags when users create posts in the community. Then having buttons that will filter the feed based on those specified tags. Again in OnChainArt some examples would be
- Digital Painting
- 3D Art
- NFT For Sale
- Traditional Art
- Sculpture
- Animation
You get the idea.
User Filters
In OCA, not too long ago we started using the Community Member tags to show which artists have verified their identities with us. Recently I decided to also use these to create another title of "Featured Artist" This is reserved for those who have a long track record of contributing extremely high quality content.
It would be cool if users could filter their feed with only the "Verified Artists" or the "Featured Artists" This would also create an larger incentive for users to verify themselves. That's how I would use that, but I'd be interested to know if anyone else has interesting ideas about how that could be used.
These are the ideas I wanted to throw out there today. Something else that I think is extremely important but I don't talk about it much is making auto-beneficiary settings available in Communities. As the owner of a pretty big community I know that sounds a bit self serving coming from me, but I think that that would benefit Hive dramatically in that creating and managing a large community becomes 1000x easier if you can pay people to work in the community and there is a financial incentive to start and grow a community. Currently it's a ton of work without much incentive. OCD is thankfully filling that void with their Community Incubation Program, but this needs to be built into the system and scalable with community growth.
What do you all think? Would especially love to hear from Community owners. Are these things you'd find useful? What sort of tools are you craving for community building and management? Let know in the comments.