The reasoning behind this move includes several reasons. First of all, we the ones managing the site are tired of spending more time on fixing modifications, skins and what not than actually building a bigger and stronger community. We've got a number of skins but I'm not worried about that, Mico and Pank have already pumped out two excellent skins and they're working on another. What the members will miss are probably some of the bloat that cause us far too much stress than their value, which isn't much as it's 90% eye-candy, 9% ego boost, 1% functionality. The biggest concern at this point is the gallery. I've been testing various things to see what we can do about this. Galleria which is an up-coming add-on will have a importer built in but for this to even get a beta release, we're probably looking at quite some time that I can only speculate. The other gallery modifications don't have an importer so I've been looking at third party gallery scripts like coppermine but none are really satisfactory... they feel very old and clunky. Worst comes to worst, I'll take the hit and lose all the uploaded content and have my staff re-upload it manually to whatever platform we choose for the gallery, it's just that there hasn't been anything satisfying.
Perhaps this thread would have been better titled "getting members off of fatty goods". On our side, we the management like xenForo's minimalistic approach. It does what we want a forum to do for the most part although it is lacking one feature I find absolutely vital - tagging/pre-fixes that spiders can crawl (IPB doesn't have this either but it will in 3.2). So we're going to be removing a lot of modifications that aren't useful, just pleasant, something probably teenagers will mostly like... and most of my members are of that age. I'm also worried about the inability to disable post incrementation... we have a forum games section and it gets quite a lot of use but I don't want people spamming games to get a higher post count. I could probably deal with this by deleting forum games thread once they reach a certain threshold but it seems tedious.
Also a question for those that did a conversion from IPB to xF, how did your member react? What did they miss the most? Did it impact your activity negatively at all? If yes, for how long?
PS: Thanks for the prompt replies. I had three to read right after I posted this.