These are various reasons why I also opted to not use it when it was finally time to retire vBulletin 3. We never did adopt vB 4 or 5, because while I'm sure the code was "better" from a software engineering perspective (using classes/OOP etc), it was also noticably slower, and the original developers had either been ousted or sold out.
The original vB developers built Xenforo, which is still in the spirit of vB 3 but with some modern amenities like live updates and the like.
I also found Discourse to be... challenging to self-host.
> I also found Discourse to be... challenging to self-host.
Made a completely different experience. Every once in a while you have to run a command. Over the last 10-12 years there were I think 2 problems where this did not work out of the box.
The original vB developers built Xenforo, which is still in the spirit of vB 3 but with some modern amenities like live updates and the like.
I also found Discourse to be... challenging to self-host.