I'll have another rummage in the settings to see what it offers in terms of notifications; I think it's email-only but I'll check. AFAIK it only does on-screen notifications for PMs, and even then you won't notice if you have animated GIFs turned off. Actually I should change that to something else.
I've wondered about activating user-accessible galleries and have raised it as a possibility for the replacement forums. The issues with that at present are that I'm not entirely up to date with the state of the actual server, but I suspect surplus capacity is probably rather limited; and how best to manage it, as there will be problems and some may need to be dealt with urgently. The other matter is that the gallery software isn't the most intuitive thing I've ever encountered.
For the general appearance, I'd personally like to keep the theme more or less as it is, perhaps slightly streamlined but not by much. Maybe I'll just add a few more rounded corners and claim it's a modern-day interface! Actually I did have to change some bits to make it usable on mobile phones and I'm not keen on the contemporary "mobile phone applications should be monochrome and look that they've been designed as a children's toy" style, so hopefully we won't be facing that. But ultimately, most of that stuff isn't my decision, all I can do is be stroppy and sulky enough until I get my way.
Anyway, tl;dr: I'm broadly in agreement with the feature requests and other stuff, while being mindful about how it can be run and managed without causing us more interesting times.
