It's not that hard to see a better approach than everything I've seen so far.
1. Host the forum and other shit separately.
Stop trying to use Discourse, accept that you have to use a Normal forum platform, and suddenly realise you can save a shitton of hosting space by cutting out the bloat while pruning and locking abandoned topics instead of letting them fester.
2. Put the insane 'turning weightgaming into a game hosting middleman' shit on the backburner and instead talk to similar forums about working together on your huge, risky 'Avoid All The Shitty Visa & Mastercard Bullshit' scheme.
A noble long-term vision, but we sure as fuck can't justify investing in shit like that as a single fetish. If grot is a grifter (doubtful), he's a terrible one since he hasn't been able to do what he always wanted and take a cut off every commercial game to fund the site/recoup costs. Thing is, there are plenty of other kink games that would benefit from that sort of service but by making it a WeightGaming thing, he's missing out hugely on what would actually turn a pretty penny.
3. Moreover, flopfarming must be destroyed.
Stop being sad and onboard more mods. Make it easier to vet games by good-faith asking the community to help define exactly what games are and aren't ok. It can't be a 'vibes' thing.
With all that shit out of the way, most of the long-tem ideas aren't that shit based on what he's promising so far (eg; no AIGC on the store does at least flag that the site won't actively fund aislop), but things would be potentially way better if grow let the people bailing him out have a stake in the forum and had them restart the all-important HRPP discussions.
And for fuck's sake, TALK TO OTHER FETISH SITES. DON'T REINVENT THE FUCKING WHEEL.