I also resist change, especially when I see no personal need or benefit from it. In time maybe the change will prove itself out, get more "comfortable"... but it has a long ways to go to win me over. So I am finding other things to do with my endless free hours right now, not spending near as much time on ECF as I did. In fact only a small fraction of it, and I'm not bothering with any other ECF forums except this one. The sharp drop off of activity on this forum was expected... in part why it no longer feels like home. I have seen it before on many other interest specific lists/forums since I first started running the Internet in the very early 90's, some that never came back to their former glory. So apparently lots of folks resist change when they were happy enough with how things were. Whats good for the goose is not always perceived as whats good for the gander. But when you're just a gander in the house of a goose...
Don't think that I'm white-knighting for the ECF because I'm not, there are still a great many policies and attitudes here that keep me from being the regular user I once was, but I'm sure the reason for the change-over to the new forum software was for reasons that we as users can't see.
The new system is undoubtedly more efficient and scalable on the back end, the sigbanner-thwarting caching system clearly exists to save bandwidth and reduce costs there, may have better support than the old vBulletin, etc etc. As users we only see the skin around the outside, there are a great many guts below it that we are not privvy to, and if everything works right, we never even think about. Maintaining a community of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of users is no small task, and if the new system makes that more manageable, then it's a worthwhile endeavor.
