A more Generic JR5
Using Jamroom
I didn't read through the entire post, but as someone who has run multiple Jamroom sites (almost none of which were music-related sites if I remember correctly), Jamroom 5 is a _significant_ improvement in making jamroom more "generic." Really all that's needed now is to change your templates, which I don't see a problem with - what was required before if you wanted to make it generic was to do some core changes and template hacks, none of which are needed now, so that's a huge thing for me. I ran it as a site for my lacrosse team, and "artists" quotas were used for "players" so it was really mindbending to set things up and make the URLs make sense and everything. Again - that stuff is not necessary now.
Jamroom started off as a music-centric cms, so the majority of the sites (I would say) are still using Jamroom for music-related sites, which is why the default templates are still all set that way. The templates have always been just a "jumping off" point though to be customized. A lot of people use it for producers and beats, and they know they have to customize the templates to change instances of artists/audio to producers/beats or whatever they're doing.
So when it comes down to it, really it's just the templates that need to be changed to make it generic, which is something a new site owner is going to do anyways to make their site different from what everyone else starts out with.
Anyways, just my 2 cents.
Kyle