There is a reason why error suppression is a built-in language construct. @Brandon Sheley you are arguing something you really do not understand. I doubt that you will find any advance programmer or program written for multiple platforms that does not contain error suppression or error response altering. In fact I do not want to work with a language that lacks this type of mechanism.
If more users would have been involved with alpha testing the releases (I am at fault here), then the error suppression would have not been an issue by the time it went to beta. The lesson here is that vBulletin needs to leave their releases longer in alpha, as I have written about before. From what I can see vBulletin has done exactly that.
I am not sure what your point is for even bringing this up anymore. All I read was a complaint with no suggestions, when I have employees like this I get rid of them due to them wasting everyone's time. Install the latest release and spend your time here on a real issue -- there are many to choose from.