Most of DotAs code is pretty old and was mostly done in GUI or GUI-like Jass.
You can just fine do that stuff with GUI. The reason why we use Jass ( and vJass ) is that it makes stuff easier and code more efficient + all the other advantages.
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.