I suspect Matt has probably learnt a very valuable lesson from his previous project, IkonBoard, which was a really popular forum software back around 2000/2001. It really pre-dated PHP a bit, so was actually developed in another language that was commonly used on websites at the time for 'dynamic content'.
Sorry for the bit of a history lesson btw! ;) But I do remember using IkonBoard 2 very well back in the day - and believe me, skinners and modders have it very easy these days making their excellent designs or bits of additional specialised functionality :)
