After many hours of frustration I finally figured out why the new topic and reply (and everything else) wasn't working.

I had set the default language to English (United_States) thinking, "Oh, if the board is set to British English then the forums will flag "color" as misspelled because it's "colour" in British English."

Well...it turns out that none of the themes are made for anything other than British English, which is why the buttons weren't showing up.

Everyone has been set back to British English...and it doesn't look like color is being flagged as misspelled either.

That'l teach me to mess with forum settings