[Adrian Schneider]

I mostly agree... a feature release which many big board owners will consider bloat.

I think the logic is pretty clear. At $125.00 a copy they need to sell volume in order to make money. There are not enough big boards to even come close to paying the bills, but new features help sell to the 1000's of small boards. I have always thought they should have an "enterprise" version with features that cater to the big boards. I would pay significantly more for such a service

If they want to have a community to back their product, they need to start catering to the big board owners more. They are the ones who have been around the longest, and are the ones who help the new site owners. Maybe they will consider some sort of enterprise version of the software. Less goodies, more performance, with more options for like searching, templates, plugins, etc. All the weak spots. If they don't, admins might turn to actual enterprise level forum solutions.

Adding new hardware obviously helps, but if the software is the weakest link, then it should either be improved or removed.

I've worked with many big boards and efficiency is always the #1 problem. Look at SitePoint... it usually takes me 10-30 seconds to perform a vB search. It's completely unacceptable. Of all sites, I'm sure they have the resources for decent hardware (and use them wisely).