Kier and the rest of the old Jelsoft team were the ones working on it? Would it have been much like XenForo? Something potentially much better? What do you think?
I think it would be much more like Xenforo and less like vB 5. Heck, I think vB 4 would've been more Xenforo-like and we'd all be looking forward to 4.3.
I'd go further than that. It would have been a whole lot better than xenForo. 3 of the world's best forum software developers is killer enough already, just imagine how powerful they are if they had the right team. I'm not talking "3-man-team." I'm talking a working team like what Jelsoft was before it was sold to IB.
I agree with what Carlos said here. It is the same brain power as what made XF but more spectacular with everyone there. I think VB5 would of been killer if the original JelSoft was there.
Is there really any doubt that vB would have been infinitely better now if Kier and Mike would have been still part of vB, minus IB? All you have to do is compare xF to vB5.
Oh no, there's no doubt it'd be infinitely better than anything Internet Brands have ever made. But there might be some that it could have been better than XenForo. On the one hand, building off existing software would have meant more features and things, but on the other... maybe Kier and co making new software let them get rid of legacy code and stuff that wasn't particularly useful in the first place. After all, they could make a new style that works how they needed it to, not one that has to incorporate the years worth of baggage and stuff vBulletin has built up over the years.