Forum SEO - Does it really matter?

[KTBleeding]

I'm curious to know what everyone thinks about this. Obviously, enough vB users think it does matter as products like vBSEO have quite a few customers. However, I don't see the point of it, perhaps someone can shed some sort of light on me here.

SEO itself is awesome. There's no denial there. But I feel that it's more important on your actual site content, rather than forum topics and posts. Out of the hundreds of thousands of popular forums that are out there, I would say that only a tiny fraction of their posts could be considered useful. Most of the others are dramatic, ridiculous, or just plain stupid and senseless.

I guess my question is, why do so many people want to try harder to get meaningless posts indexed in search engines? I think it's a much better idea to focus it on the main website content itself as content is king in a website, and not the community.

As I said earlier, it's obvious that people disagree with this since they're willing to pay well over $100 dollars to achieve it. So enlighten me.