The phpbb control panel is comparable to VB. Attachments aren't something I'd like to have on any MB I ran anyways, but there are attachment mods for phpbb (as of a year ago; probably better ones around by now). phpbb has a berjillion hacks available if you go for that kind of thing. Without mods it differs from VB in very few ways that I can remember. It's missing some of the crap VB includes which we never use, yeah. It doesn't have a calendar, for example; who ever uses the calendar? phpbb is designed to be small and fast. Fast is something EoFF could use at the moment, in my opinion, but oh well. VB is becoming bloated.

You don't have to know any more about coding to work with phpbb than to work with VB. The templates are simple HTML and CSS, from what I remember. I never touched the PHP back when I was working with phpbb, except for one little hack I added. I've had to mess with the PHP for VB many times as well. Remember when Bleys had to hack the MB every couple weeks just to get admins to have the word "admin" under their names? Remember when last week you were contemplating hacking the VB just to change how cookies work? phpbb is no worse than VB in this regard. Any MB you wish to customize beyond a certain point will require PHP knowledge.

Just because something is the most popular doesn't mean it's the best in terms of quality. Popularity is often determined by marketing more than by quality. "Everyone else likes it" is often poor justification for saying something is worthwhile. The majority of people in the world use Windows, for example. Same reason people still use MP3s even though there have been tons of far better compression schemes available. I tend to trust myself beyond the general consensus.

The real question to me is what does VB have that's different from phpbb, which would justify paying $160?