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Hey John,
Yes, the data migration took a lot of work (actually the vast majority of the work--a few hundred lines of code and a vast amount of testing and database spelunking to find where everybody puts things). I'll be writing up an article at some point in the not distant future about the process, to hopefully make such things easier for others, and posting some code skeleton examples of how it can be done in PHP (I would have had more fun doing it in Perl or Ruby, but I needed to learn PHP, anyway, to work on the site). I didn't even consider tossing out the old data as a viable option. There have been too many good conversations here to throw them away.
We chose Joomla because we need more than just a forum. A forum is only about a quarter of what we expect from our website. We also need a bug tracker, a shopping cart, and a reasonable way to deal with logged in users so they can download purchased software.
I'm not convinced Joomla is the best such option (Drupal, or one of the other newer options out there) may have been better), but it seemed like it when I first started in on the endeavor. But, it has proven to be easy to modify, fix bugs, and enhance, so we will definitely be able to get what we want out of it in time. The same couldn't be said of OpenACS (in some areas OACS was superior to Joomla, and I'll have to re-add those features back into the new website over the next week or two).
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