Thanks as always, pepsi, for your helpful replies. The best case would be for all themes to get a "private messaging" implemented but that would be further down the road if it all. In the near term I agree that we will likely see them standardize across all the apptheme templates.
A Q&A challenge response form similar to JobRoller would be most effective, especially if it allowed site admins to create a customized list of Q&A combos which were randomly chosen when the page gets loaded. This feature was added as a core feature to vBulletin (used for this forum no less!) after it became a huge success among the community as a plug-in (ref:
NoSpam!)in the beginning. It greatly reduced the 'drive-by' bot registrations for vBulletin sites and would be a major benefit for Appthemes IMO. Here's to hoping! Thanks again pepsi.