I see, that's a big transition!
askvortsov would you be interested / willing to share some of your concerns or frustrations with our current frontend system and how it's extended?
I have to be honest and say i haven't investigated it for a long time. But from what i remember, there's many more layers of abstraction in your system versus what i'm used to working with ( phpbb ), so to me, it's quite difficult to understand what's going on and trace execution. When i asked how y'all trace execution from start to finish, i didn't get an answer, and was discouraged from doing so.
I want to do some very extensive changes, like completely change how categories are displayed, especially the list, so i'd have to understand how the system works from the bottom to top.
From a developer perspective, documentation would be the #1 thing to focus on. The lowest level of abstraction possible would make for the easiest development job too.