We went ahead and included a version of a forum for the project to highlight how a module type approach can be made to include major pieces like this.

A field was added to content category called UsesCustomAreaRoute which basically allows you to create a category in the navigation that instead of building the routes for it from the database the routes are custom built for that module. If this attribute is set to true the core mvccms routebuilder will not build routes for the category but it will be shown in the nav with the correct link.

You can see this in the sandbox admin there is a forum setup like this there. I will post more on all this to this thread later on.