Yeah I'm way behind, but this has to be said.

Yes indeed Plone is a total failure, not TCLUG. It looks like you took
the site down already, but I remember looking at it not so long ago, and
it was running on Plone 1.0, with no useful extensions installed.

Why didn't it have any useful features? Because there are none!

The Plone development team is/was a total failure. Plone 1.0 was a
glimpse of what could be possible, but in reality it was completely
useless to anyone but Zope gurus who are able to hack the hell out of it
to make even minimally useful. Mind you, the selling point of Plone is
its supposed to be useable by completely non-technical users...

The developers knew this. What did they do? They told everyone to just
use CVS! Its much better! Which it was, but they left Plone 1.0 hanging
as the only official release, completely unsupported and buggy as hell,
for way too long. Unsupported by the Plone team itself, and unsupported
by third parties because they moved all their code to work with the CVS
version and didn't even try making it work with 1.0. Because 1.0 totally
blew.

They didn't even so much as release some "1.9333alpha" versions. This
discourages non-developers from touching it. And discourages
distributions from packaging it.
 
And Debian is a complete failure as usual for taking nearly a YEAR to
get 2.0 into UNSTABLE, yet they have Zope packages that are terrible and
don't even work out of the box in testing...

Basically, Plone was WAY too overhyped as being the ultimate user
friendly CMF even your grandmother could use, long before it was even
close to being ready to be used by anyone but Zope gurus. They should
have released 1.0 as an ALPHA PREVIEW and 2.0 should have been 1.0. ;P

Try again with 2.0? I've been hosting some sites on 2.0 for a while now.
Just a few days ago I upgraded to the new Debian unstable packages, and
moved one of my sites to Zope 2.7. 2.7 is laid out much better that 2.6
was, and actually sets up an instance and works right out of the box. It
looks like Zope/Plone is finally getting close to being the easy to use
turnkey solution it claims to be...

The extensions out there are still kind of terrible. Is there a Forum
that doesn't suck? CMFBoard is the only actively developed one I've been
able to find, and its still a bit buggy and lacks such essential
features as being able to move topics to different forums...