This is what I'm talking about. As for the reasons, it's the admin CP. IPB is adding features to catch up with vB very fast, but it's a long way away from having the admin CP (or the mod CP) to be up to standard. vBulletin is known to be better for large boards because of the amount of control you have (which is due to the admin CP being so far ahead of IPB's admin CP).
As for coding, I don't know much about PHP, but I do know that vB's template system is designed to be easily customisable. If we wanted, we could make EoFF look exactly like it did in vB2. We could probably get it to look exactly like IPB does. From what I've read at TAZ (The Admin Zone) and DevBoxForums, vBulletin leads the way. People do argue that IPB has advanced a lot faster than vBulletin, but vBulletin users will argue that once ten barriers are broken down over four years, anyone can walk through the debris and catch up in a matter of days. It's all about being ahead and being first to do something that matters. IPB have been first to do a few things, but not many. A very large amount of their features were functional on vB long before they were functional on IPB. If IPB can catch up with vB and continue to develop at such speeds, they may well become the better group, but everyone knows that until they do catch up, they're still behind.
