I don't care for having to click comment just to have the link work instead of text.

Indeed, status updates aren't very consistent with the rest of the board in terms of parsing. There could be some improvements to status updates such as making URLs link, emoteicon parsing(I am aware of the hook, but this is something I think should be part of the software), the ability to disable posting of links in status updates, text length of replies and max replies to a status.. Of course, options to enable and disable these would be great.