I have now played with the themes, skins, plugins, and a few other core settings. I am not 100% in love with the server restart functionality for major changes. I understand why it must restart, but because I am using nohup & forever to maintain the server process (auto-starts if server or a service drops), I think there is interference. I have had to manually restart server occasionally between major changes from the admin portal.
Overall though, I am enjoying NodeBB!