I apologize for my delayed response, life has been quite busy and I wanted to give this a thoughtful response after some contemplation. There are many things to address here so I will break them down.
Ability to see all photos
I’ve been racking my brain to figure out a way to do this, at the current time I cannot see a way to achieve what you want. The closest I can suggest is by going to each category, for example going to just ‘Avian’ will show you all the avian images in order of date posted (not by latest reply), but you have to go to each category. If we make the change suggested here, then you would only have to visit two categories to see all the images.
Grid of photos
This may be coming in the future, currently it is not possible but it is on the roadmap for this software as a potential option. Whether we choose to use the new option will depend on how it works. I have no timeline on this as I am limited by others who develop the forum software.
Discussions grouped together
I agree that discussions should be together, one option may be what I proposed here. If the consensus is to keep things the way they are, I can still break out discussions from each category. I will plan to make this change either way.
Dominance of the Landscape category
Yes, there has been an influx of landscape photographers and it is dominating the feed right now. I will take blame for some of this because it is what I know best, I have many connections in the landscape world and know how to target this audience. On the other hand, I know very few wildlife, avian, flora, or macro photographers. I need help from all of you to help me draw in these people, we need more big names in here from these categories, please tell me who they are, who I can reach out to. Or, please reach out to them yourself if you have a good relationship with them.
The other issue has been a fall off of members posting from the old site, where have they gone? There were so many posting in these categories regularly on the old site and now they have stopped. Some never made the move over, others have just stopped posting. If you have a relationship with anyone that falls into this category please reach out to them and find out why. I will be doing some research to find out who these folks are so I can get in touch with them to overcome any hurdles they have run into.
Views and Replies
I have brought back view count in the post itself, but kept it hidden in the list view. My hope is this way people will not be influenced to view an image based upon how many views it has by having that count in the list, but the poster can still see how many views they have received by visiting their post. I have also taken into consideration the Replies count, I have hidden this for now to see how if there is any effect, there may be unforeseen consequences that makes me bring this back, but I agree that this could cause ‘popularity’ problems so we will try running without it for awhile.