Quote Originally Posted by deathshadow
When asked by his nephew about his profanity, Patton remarked, "When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can't run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn't fight it's way out of a piss-soaked paper bag."

"As for the types of comments I make", he continued with a wry smile, "Sometimes I just, By God, get carried away with my own eloquence."
Choice of forum software is not really life-or-death situation in which man you quote was, isn't it? I don't think his opinion matters much in this discussion.

Might as well get automotive construction advice from the team behind the 1984 Yugo GV.
As I am from the country where (in)famous Yugo was made and since it was my first car, and since my good friend and I still drive it, I would laugh with you on this if your tone wasn't so offensive... Well, you still made me laugh :-)

As of the rest of your post, it is clear that you do know lot of web, and you did show number of places where vBulletin's output is not optimal. But I guess that's the price you have to pay if you want to have forum software which does not require you to spend enormous time setting it up, installing plugins, configuring... On top of that, I can just imaging all the features their clients requested to be available out of the box, and I can understand that they had to make some trade-offs between implementing those requests, and trying to maintain as well-formatted output as possible.