r/cade has a horrible layout, no wonder it doesn't have many visitors.
If that had any weight, all of reddit would be a ghost town, but it is most definitely not. /r/cade is just the new guy, and uptake is always slow in a community as small as ours.
I don't know why threaded message boards aren't more popular. Reddit is not perfect, I'll grant you, but it has a lot of conversational features that this site does not. Discourse actually looks like it's going to be a very, very good discussion system, once it's released. You can get the code for it now, and host it yourself now, but that would be a lot to deal with for someone that isn't familiar with hosting Ruby apps.
The monolithic, new posts always go on the bottom style that nearly every single discussion forum uses is really not ideal when you're replying or there are multiple threads of conversation within a thread. Reddit doesn't do it that way, and therefore it has some value. You can turn off the subreddit styles if you like, and get the vanilla reddit experience if that's more to your liking. Each subreddit can have its own wiki and the admins can control access to it as well. Reddit has value, and it's free. You won't earn ad revenue, but it doesn't cost anything either. Imgur.com and youtube.com are free so image & video hosting are not an issue. There is no file repository, but there are plenty of online filesharing services, a lot of which are free or close enough that it does not matter.
You might try creating your own subreddit and then style it up however you like. Maybe you won't like it, but at the very least you might learn something, and that's never wasted effort.