Yea, I've experienced this too, but I think that there's a lot of potential for a brand new community, and that's also what I'm going to do with my new project.
Instead of creating separate forums, downloads, courses and classified categories for each topic( handled via self coded separate applications) , I'm going to create clubs acting as containers, which contain the specific discussion forums, but also the related downloads, courses and classified categories. So there won't be a stand alone landing page for all downloads categories or courses at all, instead literally everything is going to be part of a club.
This should be a funny experiment.