I am glad I am seeing some responses. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far. I wanted to touch on some of the responses and clarify a bit more my intentions for each.
Permissions: I can't even begin to describe how sick I am of seeing posts about this. I don't blame newcomers for asking about it, I just feel that since it has been repeatedly asked from day 1 I am tired of seeing it. The only way to stop this question is to correct what people find to be wrong. To touch on what Hal said on this, I do plan on using this for an admin role (forum admin) and for ways to have moderators by role. This is all part of the enhancement. There is no doubt this is handled today in terms of being functional though.
Mail System: I have no intention of writing anything that will be used as an email marketing system. This would start off as use for this module and hopefully expose the API to the core in the future. Understanding a bit about how things get into the core and the process around it, you don't want to get overly complex and build requirements for an entire framework solution around a single module. The way to approach this is to minimize requirements up front, then re-define if it reaches the core level. In the beginning, the email queue will be very simple. The main reason for this instead of just running in a background thread is because of the ASP.NET thread limitation of 25 by default per processor. In a place like DotNetNuke it is very possible you could exceed this limit.
The thought is to work the system as FIFO in the beginning with no send delay. A scheduled task would run and do a check every 5 minutes. If there are no email currently being sent, it would look to the queue table to find out if it needs to start sending. The queue table also holds who to send to, what to send. Again, very simple up front. This would not be a replacement for the Newsletter module either, so please keep this in mind.
Skinning: I am concerned nobody has released themes. The reason behind this must be that it is not worth doing so for one reason or another. The current system is hard to work with for designers and other developers and this seems to be the main thing my team desires to change. My personal view is torn because although I do want this, I don't feel it is the highest priority. I must admit though, I am tired of this not being professional enough looking to me.