This is entirely subjective, but I loathe the look and feel of Discourse. Is there a chance that the forums might be migrated to something a bit more… professional(?)… in the future? I am referring to something along the lines of Xenforo or Invision. Those forums have a sleeker design, and they make it far easier to find the information you’re looking for. Not to mention that it is easier to understand the layout. That’s just my $0.02, but I figured I would ask in case this is something that other people have thought as well.
Not really, no. Not only are those alternatives you mentioned not free, but they also comes with their own issues and concerns.
Beyond that, setting another forum up, creating art resources necessary for it, attempting to move all other users over to it, etc is a major move that doesn’t really gain us anything.
We might be able to improve some aspects with Discourse (such as the front page layout, possibly, and the default theme), but that’s about it.
No, sorry.
To be honest, these forums are very intuitive for me because I spent years on Stack Overflow and they are basically a sibling project to that site. Formatting, tags, badges, etc. are all very familiar.
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No apologies are necessary. As I said before, my opinion on this is entirely subjective and I don’t expect everyone to have the same opinions as I do. I’m still glad that SpecialK is able to grow beyond Steam. Thanks for all you guys do!
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So no to phpBB?
On the other hand, can you import phpBB data into Discourse, and does Discourse play well with potato-class VPSs, specifically the $5/month 1GB Nanode by Linode?
This site is basically running on a potato-class VPS, one of DigitalOcean’s lower tiers, if not the absolute lowest. Site is usually slow when rebuilding/compiling, but part from that it works great.
Apparently Discourse doesn’t even use WebSockets, which from my testing of NodeBB tended to have a heavy impact on performance at times, and were something that CloudFlare’s reverse proxy doesn’t support an endless amount of.
I believe Kal used the preparared DO droplet as basis of the site:
As to importing from phpBB3, there’s apparently an import script:
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It was, at one point… then I upgraded the storage on it.
That’s an irreversible change, but worth it. I don’t have to think twice about dumping random files into the forum and expecting them to permalink for years 
All the rest of the services (wiki, GitLab, etc.) run on the 1 CPU node hosting options.
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My only problem is that it took me a few hours to find the button to post a new thread. A blue plus button in the corner is a Google reminiscent design that didn’t intuitively speak to me. But I did eventually find it! This site seems to serve its purpose adequately; I like it.