I have to disagree. I would much rather have vBulletin. I've used both and think vB is more user friendly. I don't care how "pretty" it looks. I can change styles if that's a concern. I think vB did suffer after they got bought out, but when Kier left, he reinvented the wheel with Xenforo and ended up with a square. I would run SMF or IPB before this if it was my site. Just my $.02...
I have to disagree. I would much rather have vBulletin. I've used both and think vB is more user friendly. I don't care how "pretty" it looks. I can change styles if that's a concern. I think vB did suffer after they got bought out, but when Kier left, he reinvented the wheel with Xenforo and ended up with a square. I would run SMF or IPB before this if it was my site. Just my $.02...
It's not so much about how pretty it is, it's about versatility and keeping up with the new tech and trends. We haz it. VB is a dinosaur. It just hasn't been completely laid to rest yet (mostly due to the numbers of copies that are there as a result of the functionality and support that it once had but doesn't anymore). It reminds me of that console games out there that insist on reusing tired old gaming/graphics engines with nothing more than a new theme.
With Xen... It's sometimes difficult to find JUST the portion of the forum that I'm looking for to modify but that's largely because I'm still learning it's ins and outs.
I can tell you that this setup is a great deal faster than VB was with the same amount of information.
Largely, the browser problems that folks are having are due to IE not fully supporting the sprite system. It's one of those occasions where the forum is ahead of /new than the browser.
The modular design of this thing though... definitely a step up. And we don't take a performance hit every time we introduce a new feature.