This is because Shawn is very good at what he does. (All Shawns fall in this catagory, right?!) He is like an interpreter, very fluent in the language. I bet he dreams in 1's and 0's, or #fffff, etc.
That's true too... For a living, I build very large/complex commercial software packages, I don't do SEO or web design or anything like that as a job. But I have administered phpBB forums as well, and it's infinitely more difficult to hack phpBB to do things (and then you have to redo them on an upgrade, which I hated).
vBulletin is realatively expensive. If it was cheaper a lot more people would be all over it! Hopefully phpBB 2.2 will be much better, although who knows when that will be. ...then again, "You get what you pay for".
Relative to free, anything is expensive. Don't get me wrong, I think phpBB is awesome, especially for the price. But vBulletin really isn't all that expensive (a $160 one-time cost isn't terrible). And truthfully, before vBulletin 3, it wasn't worth the cost. phpBB was "good enough". But vBulletin 3.0 really took everything to a whole new level (especially the administration/backend). So for me, the $160 cost was well worth the time saved hacking on phpBB trying to get it to do things that either vB does out of the box (like spider friendly).
I apologize for this thread taking a different turn. It doesn't quite fit in the Suggestions section. How is vBulletin's import? Is there a migration path from phpBB to vB?
Yep... it's automatic. SEO Guy's forum started with phpBB and moved to vBulletin without any problems (and so did SEO Chat) as an example. It's able to suck in everything (forums, posts, users, etc.) Coding is something I know a LOT (I can't stress that enough) about. And I'm also not quick to give my personal recommendation/blessing to something either. But in the case of vBulletin, it's without a doubt THE cleanest, object oriented, easiest to work with piece of software I have ever run across. You can't appreciate it at all until you see the admin/backend (I only wish I saw it sooner).
Of that you have now convinced me. I have the phpbb forums already installed but I am going to move across - you see it in the results of the search engines