Image galleries rather than inline posts would help with the "reply" or "quoted" images being repeated over and over in threads. It makes seeing new/different images much more difficult, and heaven-forbid, you're on a slow connection, you're going to see the same night herron over and over before you ever see another bird pic.
I think ideally someone's post would link to a gallery and people could leave individual comments on a particular photo without quoting them inline in the forum - then all users could see all comments on a particular photo. And on that subject, is there really a need for a forum for gallery posts at that point? It could be a gallery for the images, and a forum for "how-to's or techniques" for particular types of photos. I've also wondered about adding a 5-star voting system to the photos. Not that this is a contest, but it could help elevate particularly spectacular photos so that more people can see them, rather than them getting buried in post 358 of a 1000-post thread.
Also, the idea of being able to "unsubscribe" from a thread is nice - make one comment in the bird thread, and you're hooked to it for life.
Lastly, keyword tagging could be useful - particularly for searching for a topic, rather than people using their own versions of things (or mis-spellings of them). For example. A pre-set list of keywords that can be applied to a post - Mark IV or 7D, eclipse photos, whatever. Using the wiki-engine, you might even be able to make it user-maintained so that an industrious sort of person/group (maybe non-CR moderators??) could help police the list, so that CR peeps don't have to.