[slinky]

We're in the same boat you are in. Given that (1) the Drupal - vBulletin integration is a fork and not true Drupal and (2) the vBulletin licenses we were going to use will now cost a ton of money to upgrade, we decided that the Drupal forums with existing add-ons more than do the job. The bridge has no long term future, especially now since development for 3.8 is dead. Most of the "hacks" are not needed in the drupal forums and, for the most part, the functionality and appeal of what is vBulletin is being approximated with drupal forums and the integration that it provides with profiles. It just takes more work but I think you'll see more of these "premade solutions" that will make it easier to install everything more quickly. Going forward we are going to use Drupal with drupal forums or provide a full integration of Wordpress with an open source forum like phpbb or one of the others, which is also much easier and painless to integrate.