stararmy Well to be honest your first paragraph is all about creating modern template. The main issue here is the amount of contributors and designers available or interested in dokuwiki. So in order to get things moving, you need to find people willing to invest time in creating templates.
On your second paragraph, you talk about an alert system, this would require a database. Which Dokuwiki isn't really designed to be used with. There are plugins like SQL Lite that add support for database. So this plugin could surely be used to create a dependent plugin for alerts. So it's not entirely impossible. But I think it's beyond the scope of Dokuwiki Core. The only notifications that I know is currently setup is the email notification on page updates. But these are not stored on Dokuwiki.
As for the survey, this forum is a great place to do this already. So at this point it would be more a question of marketing. Which on open source project such as this, is much harder to do because of the budget constraints that comes with this. Projects like Dokuwiki relies heavily on word to mouth to spread. So the best thing is to talk about it every chance you've got.
Finally on the discussion of Authentication, there is a surprisingly a healthy amount of authentication protocols supported through plugin on Dokuwiki. More then most CMS I have encountered. Adding support to AuthPDO would simply require a developper willing to invest some time on a plugin.
Personally I have been using Dokuwiki for quite some time now. And I just started to get into it's development. By contributing on a fork of the Writr template (Writr2). But that is just one of my many on-going development project.