Thanks for taking in all of the feedback!
Really my only concern with forcing communities into host mode is that it kind of requires everyone to watch the same stream. However, if there was a way to pull up a chat room from a different channel on any stream I’d switch instantly and move everything into a channel instead of a group chat.
There could be a hosted stream on the “community” channel page but nobody is forced to watch it over something else to participate in the chat. The channel page would also serve as a welcome page to new chatters, which is pretty cool.
There is some great potential in host mode for communities but at the moment it still lacks some versatility for me.