So instead of people manually typing in plaintext their preferred gear or whatever in their signatures and profiles, it would be cool if there was a hyperlinked(?) standardized dynamic database, this would churn out valuable or insightful statistics of all the users preferences, trends etc...

If threads had above their title or in between a side scrolling thread of polls (questions), it's usefulness compounded over time. Maybe even get some meta thread action going based off interests, like concentric circles.