well lets be honest - you aint missing much.
If u want the truth then here it is :

Hacks in the old days where a lot better and released virtually every day.There was always something good to mess around with or something you wanted to Install.Now you come here and you lucky if something is released in a week and if it is then its proberly a minor template edit disguised as a hack.Good decent hacks are far and inbetween these days.Things aint looking so good for vb at moment as getting hacks is nearly non - existent unless you willing to dip your hands in your pocket and pay for any hacks you need.People will disagree and say vb is going strong,well maybe the board software is but the hacks are certainly not.Go see how busy Paid requests section is.Should give you some indication of how things are going.

And welcome back m8 :)

Hi N9ne, good to see you again!

Welcome back, N9ne.

Glad to hear your well N9ne. Have you finished your degree now?

Dean: nope! Still another year and a term to go. Exams are a real pain.

lasto: 'back in the day' there was perhaps a core of some 15-20 coders who were releasing hacks often. They were often people who had a lot of time on their hands - people in their teens. I'm surprised that this hasn't continued; perhaps the opportunity to earn from hacking has led to its demise.

Probably, but there are still a few teen coders around here...

dont get me wrong im not calling the current coders but i want to make a point to how different it is today to how it was back then.
I could go on other board software and get hacks galore as there is a big userbase creating hacks for them so why has vb got it so wrong ?

Possibly, if you mean free software, then maybe because the coders for vBulletin know people will pay money for modifications and products while there might be a tendency to not buy for phpBB/SMF/MyBB addons because the core products are free? Then again, I don't notice too much of a shortage of mods. I mean, there's only one type of add on which is rare (cash and store mods) and one type which is pretty much non existant (RPG) that are major modifications.

What uni are you at N9ne?

Your PM box is full ;).