There are tons of skins for phpBB to make it look as you want. There are also more then a few people out there that will make a custom skin/mod to make it look exactly as you want. It's also very easy to find all sorts of mods for phpBB that you can do to change it however you want.
I haven't installed the mod to allow people to put images inside their posts mainly because I don't want to fill up my host space with images. You can EASILY include links in posts as well as format it (within reason).
As for appearance, I like the look of phpBB MUCH better then vBulletin. Where is your bulliten using Woltlab???
Why pay for a BB package when you don't have to (for ANY level)? I took a look at that woltlab price scheme... If you want lifetime updating, it's gonna cost you. Meanwhile phpBB is FREE FOREVER! Also, since phpBB is OPEN SOURCE, you KNOW you can find tons of people to help you out with it.
BTW, the company that I purchased my e-commerce/shopping cart package from uses phpBB for their boards. I just checked, they have 1259 registered users and 11500 articles at present.
Don't pay for something UNLESS the open source options simply contain NONE of what you want or MUST have. It's easy to change the phpBB package to make it do anything you want.
