Well, I totally agree that phpBB is confusing and lacks many features, and doesn’t look as stylish as discourse. I do prefer discourse in every way above phpBB. But if forums where I’m active only want to switch to discourse, if it looks more like it, well… why not make some extension where discourse look more like phpBB ?
I understand that the discourse team doesn’t feel like doing this, but I was wondering if it is possible, I’m trying to achieve it with CSS, it is kind of hard, I’m not sure if I will succeed, I will post it if I have something.
Maybe I should note, that only after I really began to look at phpBB, when trying to copy that style for discourse, I noticed how much strange design things there are. Like every post must have a title, but nobody cares to give the post a title, so at every post you have: “Re: Topic Title”. I honestly just hadn’t noticed that, I think people reading the internet get trained just ignoring things that are not interesting, like an advertisement banner etc.