A few suggestions:

While I don't want to sound like i'm trying to change everything on my 5th day here, I have some suggestions that I think make sense:

1) Allow towns to make town shops, where the owner of the shop is the actual town (the transactions directly effect the town bank). That way we can get people to help support their town by buying materials and, for instance, selling food harvested from a town farm at a discount rate to the town, which would then be shared out to the players.

2) A kit for lords? the archer kit was always nice in a pinch, and a lord is a step up from archer, yet has no kit involved. Of course, you get to have a town, but I'd like to see a lord kit that spawned some stone tools/weak weapons. Or, you know, a fishing rod

3) Towny has a town/nation chat system. idk if you've tried enabling it before, but it would help keep the global chat to more pertinent messages, letting people in the same town communicate without bothering everyone else with unimportant messages. I know it's tough to set up, I ended up giving up trying to get it to play nice with essentials chat, but I think it would do well with the vanilla chat we use.

4) We have a portal room, do you think there's any way to fit one more portal in that goes straight to the nether? Not so important for established players, who have the obsidian to make one, but it might be nice for new players.

I do like all of these suggestions, especially the town/nation chat, but about the Nether thing. The nether has very limited fortresses and I would not like to see them all wiped out by new people that just join to grief and mess with people.