Regarding SMF 2.X , I'm not sure but I think I've heard theymos say that the second version has a lot of security issues, even more than the first one.
Security should be one of the key comparison criteria, and it should be evaluated as objectively as possible, not by hearsay. Every product, OTF or home grown, is going to have security issues, but I would tend to trust more the one that has the most eyeballs, and SMF gets a lot. This might be useful:
http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Understanding_SMF_SecurityActually, the current version of SMF used here is heavily modified to address many flaws, both functional, feature related as well as exploits.
Every product, OTF or home grown, is going to have "flaws" (requirements gaps). Theymos addressed those of SMF 1.x--we're talking about 2.x. The existence of the customizations has been mentioned repeatedly throughout his RFC threads:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45372.0https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50617.0but has Theymos documented his mods somewhere? It would be nice to see a list, and then see which of them has been addressed by 2.x or an available mod, and estimate the effort required to recreate the others.
Participants in this thread should be asking themselves what is special about the bitcoin community that requires features not used by the other thousands of online communities. It would probably be simpler and cheaper to contribute those additional features back to an open-source project like SMF, or provide them as mods:
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/Sorry, I am allowing myself to be goaded into expressing a product opinion. Analysis first....