Situation about crappy addons and suggestion for possible solution

I've been testing a lot of different plugins yesterday. My goal was to set up a proper and usability friendly forum which is easy and fun to use. Unfourtunately the addon issues I had with Vanilla 1 still seem to be existent. There are several addons for this and that function, but everyone has ad- and disadvantages, some don't get updated anymore and some don't work together.

I really wasn't satisfied with any of the editors for example. I'd like to give my users the possibility to directly embed images and YouTube videos. I wonder why there is no option in Vanilla 2 to embed pictures via link. Magic works ok, but kinda screws the first post...not a perfect solution if you ask me. Max ImageSize worked pretty well, but only if the img-tag is used, not for links. I tried to mix addons and tried all of the three editors which offer text modifications (bold, underlined) and also including pictures together with several image resize addons. Nothing worked here though, even worse...the editors kinda suck if you ask me. Bugs, too many or not enough options and even wrong file names cost me hours to even just make them work.

I'd love to have images embedded (best would be if you could en- and disable this function) with a preview (using a custom width, so I can use it for my theme) while still being able to click on the image to get to the original source.
Using HTML and the max image size addon works for me, the thing is thought that I cannot expect my users to be familiar with HTML tags.

So here's my suggestion: What about a simple addon which let's you add HTML tags to you comments? Like highlight some words and press "b" which inserts automatically. Same for images...click on some img button which asks you for the URL and adds to your comment. I am not familiar with PHP or JavaScript, but this is pretty easy to do I guess - still didn't find a similar function anywhere.

Also an addon like Vanillacons for Vanilla 1 is totally missing. I just wonder if people don't need this or if there really are no requests for stuff like this. Simple menu which can get opened or closed which shows the smileys and you can add them into your comment by clicking on them.

I do have a lot of respect for all the scripters which spend their free time coding addons for Vanilla for free and there is no way forum users can demand anything. Looking at all those "killer features" of Vanilla though, I do miss some basic functions which are available for a lot of other forums. Now when Vanilla also offers paid services, one should maybe think about some kinda of award if talented scripters do actually develop well coded addons which are updated regularly. I am sure every Vanilla forum hoster - and therefor Vanilla as well - would have something from that.