Most of that is just for moderating. And if relay operators need to moderate, you will need to design something like those actions soon or later. Either via Nostr or some other API. But if there is moderation, those methods will always be there in some form.

I'm just thinking relationship statuses for joining communities, nip-22 comments for threads, and a single note for the community anchor/id, name and description to start (addressable event for updating description can come later, its optional). there's almost nothing to it!

Isn't that a NIP-22 with `I` tags on hashtags? If there is no moderation, I don't think there is a need for picture and about me blurbs as they would just try to drive the conversation to one direction or another. With the hashtag, all the meaning must be extracted by the thing that cannot change: the hashtag name. Everything else is fluid. And it doesn't make sense to remove the fluidness without moderation to enforce a certain view.