Like Billiken, who posted "Joomlaforge sucks", I am a site builder, not a developper, and I relate to just about everything he says. I've been running around Joomla forge for almost 3 hours only to find all the projects I'm interested in have not released any files yet so I should get my files from mamboforge anyway... I got so frustrated I wanted to through my laptop away!
However, I would not say Joomlaforge sucks, I would say, Joomlaforge appears to me as an immature yet maybe promising forge. But a forge is a full blown project in itself. It's just as complex as a CMS (and probably much more...) it looks like it's going to take you guys some time to make it work and introduce much needed features like software map, categorization and quick search and so on...
Right... The problem is, WE NEED THE FORGE AND WE NEED IT YESTERDAY. I have a few customers running on Mambo and I want to upgrade them. I also want to set up my new customers with Joomla. For that, I need to know I can rely on the forge to find the components and modules I need, fast.
Core Mambo was good, sure. Core Joomla is good also... Good, mature, reliable. No doubt.. We all love it, we're all convinced, we all have customers happily using it... Yet, the real power of Mambo came from the community. It came from knowing that whatever your needs, somebody would have developed something already and THAT YOU COULD FIND IT FAST on the forge, easily and painlessly. That's why I chose Mambo in the first place, that's why I stick with it over other promising CMS like Xaraya or Plone...
But I'm worried now. A mature community with so many projects and so many users is going to put tremendous pressure on the forge developers. And open source projects are not very good at handling such pressure. Frustrated developers might end up giving up on their components. Frustrated users might switch back to Mambo or other CMS's... Not to mention, it must be very frustrating for the forge developers themselves to be putting all this hard work into a project, only to hear people complain and rant all the time...
The mambo Joomla split was painfull/unsettling enough for us site builders (not to mention having to explain it to our customers...), why make it even more so by using an unknown forge? Why not use a gforce powered forge until the custom made Joomlaforge is actually ready to offer all the much needed functionality? I understand sourceforge is behind Joomlaforge... but where are all the cool sourceforge functionalities?
Please understand, I am not criticising anybody's work here. I appreciate open source is made by marvellous people happily sharing the product of their hard work, for free,and I am very very thankfull. But the gap between what the forge does and what we need is scary.
Please help me build my trust that I am not taking my customers with me into a nightmare...
Claire
and rest assured we have some really, really, REALLY cool presents for you in the works. 
