Kestrel brought this up as well. At the very least, introducing a Characters tab is a common request.
Custom tabs are the start of a cool direction of actually letting people shape a roleplay into something beyond the flat forum topic/post habit. Hopefully the start of a rabbit hole that inspires new ways of organizing roleplays for people with similar ambitions.
The forum is just over a week old now and I'm still locking down basic forum features. But I look forward to hitting the point where I can start iterating on the edge with features like this. I agree with your concerns, too. And I'm not sure what the solutions look like. I do know that the simple IC/OOC/Characters tabs are a good place to "freeze" at for most people. I would like to open an experimental category for people interested in going beyond it.
But that depends a lot on my ad situation a week from now.