Thomasss Unread indicators for the tags page is something we'll look to add eventually.
As for mini-profiles – hover over an avatar to see a mini-profile. That kind of information isn't integral to the discussion taking place, so we don't show it by default, but it's never more than a hover away. And if you really wanted to show it inline, it wouldn't be hard with an extension.
To generalise: We appreciate your desire to do things in a more traditional way. In fact, this appreciation is at the heart of Flarum – it's fundamentally extensible, so all of what you're asking is possible. However, we have limited dev resources, and we have our own vision for what Flarum's default approach should be. Unfortunately we can't please everyone at once.
Anyway, let's keep on-topic. Previous forum software I've used? I ran a few communities on IPB 1.3 and 2.x back in the day, as well as SMF and phpBB. Then I built esoTalk. Now this.