Which is probably why you can let users choose which display to use even within the phpBB construct. Believe me, you're preaching to the choir when it comes to preferred format, but you won't convince 95% of the existing site (including most, probably all, of the Admins) to switch to the format you, me and MAYBE a dozen others prefer. If they wanted that they'd have done it instead of strenuously arguing against it every time the topic's been raised. As long as it's a choice between the format 95% prefer and the one 5% prefer, guess who always wins that argument. The former, as they should; it's even less fair for the minority to force an unwelcome format on the majority than vice versa. wotmaniacs don't HAVE to change, but attracting new members will mean accomodating them to some degree as well as offering interesting content, and since the desire for paged threads can be accomodated without denying anyone nesting (and vice versa) I see nothing to gain by refusing EITHER. Catering to one group to the exclusion of the other discourages that other, whichever it happens to be.

Attracting new members is a lot bigger than this issue, though it does include it. Despite looking I haven't seen a lot of new members posting, but I've mainly looked on the WoT and Community Boards because that's where I usually am (OTOH, Quick Polling indicates that's true for most, so maybe it IS representative). I doubt there are hard stats even on the Team Board, but know there aren't any elsewhere; the closest you'll find to THAT is the Quick Poll I linked in a post above, which you might not have seen because you have to open it to do so (sigh). The bottom line, however, is the same for new members as for all members: Improving the site means adding something beneficial and it's not a zero sum game, so we could add a paged thread option without removing nesting. Everyone wins, and no one loses (except probably Ben, who has to find a way to code it, but without learning a lot of programming I can't help him there).