I agree on most people being attracted by the looks of vBulletin... thats one of the reasons I want templates, so that we can change the looks of our boards. After templates are fully implemented I believe designers will be able to come up with really interesting options. On this issue, I do not expect changes to be too big at all until the boards are fully template based because we will obviously want a consistent look throught the boards... I believe Scream is planning on doing it little by little, so it will take quite some time for the looks to really change, but templates should do it.
On this article, yes, it seems quite old, though the copyright says 2001.
