I’m a fan of open source, too and under the hood, EE uses MySql and php. You’re right that phpBB and vBulletin both have more features than ExpressionEngine, however they don’t integrate well with our main site features: news, reviews, and commentary (as well as some other projects in the works). We went with EE because we felt it has the right feature set without including a lot of bells and whistles most people end up stepping over.
Most of the problems the users from Madness are having aren’t due to EE’s feature set but rather from the import we did from the old forums, so blame our own user error, not the product
. We would have had similar issues going between any two systems.
We’re still working on Madness user permissions. It’s gotta be something simple in the db that we just haven’t uncovered. You may register as a new user if you want instant access. Send me an email or a PM if you want me to delete your Madness account so that you can register with the same name.
Thanks for your patience, hope you stick around.