Can you find out any regularity when the discussion section doesn't show up and when it does? It would help me to find the reason.
For the devel version, there are new plugins to replace the functionality of the current Blog Plugin:
Discussion,
Tag and new
Blog. They have cleaner code because of the new action plugin API instead of a dirty template hack.
It's not yet possible to add buttons to the toolbar in the editor window without a modification in the core code of DokuWiki. It is not very difficult to add an additional button in inc/toolbar.php, but I won't spend my time for this. If you do, be sure to add it as a tip to the wiki page of the plugin(s).
When you define
namespace templates with preset markup for tags and discussion, you don't have to enter these on every page.