@omz - It sounds like upgrading the forum, keeping it secure and all the ops work is taking away from your ability to work on Pythonista which makes me all for a subreddit. Apollo works fine for mobile for most cases, and you could then have a dedicated mod staff to keep it clean. I don't think it would be any better or worse than a dedicated forum, and it could be easily linked to /r/learnpython for the learning, just starting questions that aren't Pythonista specific as well as /r/Python for some heftier questions that are not Pythonista specific.
If folks are worried about it looking cluttered, there are ways to have CSS help with that. There's also the RES which is an addon for most browsers that will help with things like unread etc. If that doesn't work, unfortunately Reddit keeps certain website features behind the paywall for the subscribers to Reddit (the Gold program). Apollo is a pretty great app on mobile for a sub there.
Overall: +1 for a subreddit, if nothing else to ease your interaction with the community and remove the ops work that you're doing now so you can focus more on Pythonista and any other projects you have going on!