I believe that, for many, this does what they're wanting from xenporta: a way to get featured threads out front on the forum. But this is better than xenporta because it's not separate from the forum home page. It's integrated. Perhaps Brogan was wise enough to understand this. Perhaps it was an accident. In any case, this is probably all you need to get a highlighted thread out front without resorting to a "portal" solution requires of your users an extra click or three to get back to the forum.