With the new spectate mode, we could allow players to visit the main world and the creative world as a spectator which would prevent them from griefing. If they would like to continue onto the main world, then they would apply on the Minecraft Forums to get white-listed.
For community building, what could be done is to pre-make the buildings in our sandbox world and then make it in the new world once it has been finalized. With that we could potential allow approved non-staff members help out building under the supervision of an Architect that is online.
We could move over to 1.8 now if we go vanilla on it using some trickier with command blocks AND whitelisted for staff and reputable members. Then after Spigot and said plugins are 1.8 ready we will allow anyone.
The Spigot Team is now providing patches that keeps things going. If they come out with 1.8 soon, we'll move over pretty fast on a new map following the items I mentioned above unless someone strongly objects with debatable points.
There is also a new "modded" server in the works to help prevent all this DMCA fiasco in the future. This new server is being developed by key Bukkit devs, Forge devs, Spout devs, Spigot devs, and other notable devs in the Minecraft community called Sponge. They are building it up from scratch to start on 1.8. However, CraftBukkit plugins will not be compatible with Sponge. So once things are in a production build and plugin devs have created a version of the plugin to work with Sponge or we find a plugin to replace it, we will move over to this new server. Hopefully it will be smooth transition.
Now unto non-Minecraft related topic.
I always envisioned XPE to be a "family" friendly gaming community/family beyond Minecraft. All games at some point lose their spark with players and people will move onto new/other games. What other games or areas would you like to see the community move into? I'm thinking of restructuring the forums to Games: F2P (TF2, Planetside, Trove, etc), P2W (Pay to Win games, that is non-balanced F2P), Paid Games (Minecraft, BF4, Terraria, etc).