How can one framework seemingly decide to sometimes send notifications and sometimes not? ActiveSocial seems a bit like HAL. I never know from day-to-day if my clients and i will ever be notified.

At this point with Active Forums and Active Social, all Email issues are usually related to web server or SMTP configuration. Troubleshooting SMTP is very difficult since it usually involves a remote service. We have very verbose logging within all of SMTP procedures. If you have errors in your event log it should tell you some details about the communication process if it is failing within code. If you don't, then you will want your SMTP host to provide you with some kind of logs so you can analyze the traffic.