I'm still on the fence about communities, because I'm not convinced it will help increase discovery and engagement more than it would create ever increasing walled gardens reinforcing the opposite behavior.

I think the opposite will happen lol.. I would think it'll be easier to make sense of the community and easier for curation as well.

some clean and clear marketplace to introduce new users to the DAPPS built on the STEEM blockchain (Busy, BBChain, Zappl, DTube, etc) on the user dashboard

This is gonna be Steemconnect v2 i think, it'll be like a dashboard with permission apps. Not too sure if it'll be a discovery tool though.