[shiva]

Kind of agree with you there about the themes, or lack of them. The thing is that with the overly insane complexity of the VB template system, most people just don't even want to bother with it. I made a attempt a couple years ago, took me 2 months of studying and work just to get it to work, and I felt like you needed a rocket science degree by the time it was all said and done.
And then, of course, they changed the thing on us with the new version, using xml etc, so I decided to myself to say the heck with it. I got a premade design, rather than spend more of my time trying to figure out the new setup.
Shame it's not like the other forum software, or PHP-Nuke/PostNuke etc. Themes were very easy to do, and if you experimented a bit with it, you could do some surprising things.
I'm looking forward to this release, personally, I don't need the shopping cart (I'm a totally free resource site) or the photopost (I use coppermine) but from what I have seen, this looks very good.