"There is but one candle that I can always see. . ." Revise this. It doesn't seem to say what you mean.
It seems like you were once standing on a sure foundation, but it fell because of a discovered flaw. It seems like you can't trust it again or risk being destroyed. But you relied so much on this assumed truth, that it made you comfortable.
I don't think I'm dealing with quite the same pressures though, at the very least its a significantly smaller system. For the time being I'm just going to put together a quick scrubby box though and hope it works good enough to not make my house toxic
I do know this - xenforo dropped the ball by not keeping the vbulletin reputation comments as a feature. The loss of the Reputation comments data when we switched to Xenforo really was the death knell for the site when it came to all the users that left. I know I missed it so much and I got way less interested in the site when that feature was gone and I run the site.