Forum Channel Suggestions

I personally love the idea of forum channels, but they still need some improvements. As a community feature, I feel like their purpose should be to reduce channel bloat in servers, but it's not quite there yet. Here's my suggestions on how they could be even better:

Allow users to chat in a forum topic without following it. Automatically following a post after every message floods the channel list quickly. Because of this, it may discourage users from participating in conversations. This should be optional.
Allow admins to lock posts without actually closing them, to allow read-only topics. This could allow a server to have a single informational post describing the purpose of the forum, as the pinned message, for example. ("Guidelines" isn't quite enough.)
Allow more than one pinned post OR prevent posts from expiring. I'd like to see permanent topics that don't have an activity time limit. I feel like posts should be more like mini-channels, instead of just fancy threads. Keep the "Hide After Inactivity" settings, but include a "Never" option.
Release forums to the remaining 10% already! Also, please allow server owners to opt into new beta features, it would be incredibly helpful for managing servers. T_T