To my knowledge phpBB has massive support and a massive amount of add-ons and extensions, it is "probably" the easiest to go with and customize.

I tried smf once and it was immediately (visually) way too overloaded and confusing looking.

Although I personally I create generally everything from scratch myself, including forums, I don't have "all" the fancy features but I have mostly what I need .

If going from scratch is not realistic, I guess I would suggest phpBB, although there are other alternatives I cannot recall the name of, off the top of my head. I tried quite a few locally using WAMP but ended up opting for a from scratch job to get the most out of my bandwidth and have good website intergration etc.

I am sure what ever you guys decide will be great. I mean it does not need to be fancy right? Just clean, functional and easy to read (seen as most of what were doing here is well reading and writing lol).