I've been playing 1.8 with some IRL friends of mine and I've been loving the tits off of it and I really want to play on S again. Heres what I think should go down.
For starters I think a 1.9 reboot would be the best course of action.
Community - Simple Arena with all kinds of different fights for people to enjoy, not just clan battles but I'd like to see player vs mob fights and randomly selected one on ones. Leave clans alone to form naturally, none of that faction plugin guff, keep it more vanilla. Leave things like balancing mobs and XP out of the equation as 1.9 is going to change everything and were all gonna have to learn new stuff. Balancing can come in a future revision (or sooner if truly necessary)
Design - Spawn can look pretty sweet as long as it isnt larger than like 250 blocks, I'd say a single world with borders limited at say 1500+- Smaller map means people have to interact more often with each other. would definitely have to tweak world generation to get a variety of biomes on a smaller map though.
Features - LWC. Yeah.
Goals - Well if the community cant succesfully keep themselves engaged with each other hopefully the arena will be enough. I think everyone learning and getting used to 1.9 will also keep people pretty focused as it did back when 1.0 hit.
Plugins - LWC (if its even still a thing anymore), and the usual mod/admin plugins.
Now while I do strongly prefer a vanilla minecraft experience, I do think that keeping S mostly vanilla for a 1.9 debut would be the best option since everyone is going to have to change how they play the game and adding in all kinds of plugins and stuff will probably make it daunting to not only learn new stuff about pvp and everything else but to learn new plugins too. Lets keep things simple and enjoyable.