In terms of listing new articles and latest article comments, we need to make some distinctions:
An article has a blog ID.
A forum post does not.
Therefore, newest articles and newest article comments should only be listing things that have a blog ID.
We should use that as an opportunity to display both the latest articles, latest article comments, and latest forum activity.
I think one of the frustrations (Certainly one of mine) with the new JU is being whisked away to the forums when it is not intutive that that would happen. It also causes FORUM traffic from WinCustomize to get mixed in with BLOG activity on JoeUser.
People on WinCustomize who have personal pages can write articles, but they don't have to. We need to separate the two concepts so that people who want to read articles are reading articles as opposed to being sent over to look at forum posts.