neither am I, there's a good reason people are willing to pay for older BB systems like IPBoard and vBulletin, they work and they are iteratively improved upon instead of 'UX-rebooted' like Discourse and NodeBB. I personally don't think any of the systems are perfect but the the older forums work fine as long as they are popular enough that resources are dedicated to policing them.. so I personally feel proper inter-forum karma integration should be top priority, more-so than new UXs!

This is why I prefer https://github.com/radar/forem by the "Ruby hero" Ryan Bigg. It's also for Rails but without the bells and whistles from Discourse. A.k.a. "The best Rails forum engine. Ever.", it's perfect if you want to build something unique from the ground up.

I would associate Discourse more strongly with Javascript or Ember than Rails.