Does vBulletin fit the bill for ME?

[Brad]

You can hack the posting functions to work any way you want, as long as you know how to code. IIRC the problems you pointed out in the posting fetures have been around for along time, in most all bulletin board systems. There where some hacks for vb 2 that 'fixed' this and inserted the smilies/bbcode where the cursor is currently at.

And yes you can make vBulletin look like anything, all templates and style variables are stored in the database and all can be edited from the admin cp. I have used ibf 1.x myself and I find vBulletins template system much easyer to work with.