I view this step with regret — for BuddyPress — just as I consider the decision as a whole to be questionable.

So far, under BuddyPress (with WooCommerce), we have only used a few plugins from BuddyDev.
XProfile Custom Field Types as well as MediaPress are two absolutely sensible — and unfortunately also necessary — BuddyPress extensions.

That the developer side has not managed over all these years to simply transfer existing WordPress functionality such as media handling and post creation to the BuddyPress layer is a mystery to me and was certainly a cardinal mistake. Whether this was due to arrogance or the belief that APIs needed to remain open to third parties is beside the point. From version 12 onward, projects were announced within the BP team, then only half-implemented (BP Attachments), and ultimately more or less quietly abandoned. Instead of making a clean break early on, transitional solutions (BP Classic) were created for (very) old BP plugins, which later turned out to be an obstacle.

I also find it unfortunate that there no longer seem to be any major sponsors. If Automattic weren’t seemingly adding a thousand new features to WooCommerce every day and instead invested some effort into BuddyPress and bbPress, the project would certainly be in a much better position today. BuddyPress still appears to be used internally by some larger companies; in that respect, I am somewhat surprised by the negative assessments of its performance, which are supposedly only fixable through a complete restart.

What is undisputed is that development is absolutely lamentable and user numbers are steadily declining. Official BP support also seems to be virtually non-existent by now, and the few questions in the forum are mostly of little relevance; timelines for further development can at best be understood as rough guidelines. Not to mention the oft-criticized miserable color scheme of the forum, which in some cases renders posts nearly unreadable.

All the more pleasing, then, was repeatedly finding detailed help and numerous code snippets here in this public forum. Response times for free support were exceptional in particular. In that sense, this site can justifiably be described as the de facto (unofficial) BuddyPress support forum — for now.

The move away is therefore probably consistent. However, I genuinely wonder where this new project is supposed to fit in — in my view, it can no longer be yet another BuddyBoss offshoot. Other approaches such as PeepSo, Ultimate Member, or ProfileGrid — to name just a few — are already pursuing the freemium model and are cannibalizing each other.

If, in the end, all social community sites with their ready-made (paid) extensions look more or less the same, an open approach with clearly defined APIs for extensions still seems to me to be the right path.

This is probably why many BP site owners with years of experience (despite AI) will try to remain on their existing platforms for as long as possible — with BuddyBoss unfortunately likely to be the ultimate beneficiary in the long run.