Hello, i think i haven't talk in here before but now i do
I would like to point out i tried to visit Doom Armory and it was under a database problem, so unable to visit the page and its content.
Unfortunately, yeah, that site was so complicated it ultimately could not be ported to phpBB3. I know Grubber was a bit of a technical genius with that stuff but unfortunately I do not possess the same skills he had, and I was not able to port his work over. The biggest thing that would have been lost with Armory was the subtitles for the topics; something that was used extensively even with other hostee sites on DRD Team back in the phpBB2 days.
Ultimately the move to change to phpBB3 had to be done, though, as phpBB2 is riddled with security problems and other issues, and phpBB3 also offered a lot more flexibility, despite the loss of the subtopic mod that was applied to phpBB2.
This is why I do not heavily mod my phpBB forums; forward compatibility is a huge issue, even with minor patches. phpBB3 is considerably better about it than phpBB2 was, but it is still problematic. Consider it lesson learned when I was hosting a number of guild sites for WoW way back in the day.
In my opinion phpBB3 should have an API and an event-call interface for addons; it would make modding the software a lot easier and a lot more forward-friendly. You should never mod the original code directly to create addons in any software, in my opinion.