[Marek]

We considered switching to a standalone forum that allows importing, but ultimately chose to go with the forum module that is part of ExpressionEngine, which is the CMS that will also be driving the new site. (If you're curious what it looks like, Double Fine uses an older version of it on their forums).

This has major advantages from a site development point of view, which for us outweigh the issue of having to separately archive the old threads.

It's not ideal of course, and we'd definitely prefer to have everything in one place, but practically it might not be quite as bad as you suggest. Nearly all active threads are ones made recently, and the exceptions (such as sticky threads or long-running threads like Thread Must Die) can be restarted. Again, not ideal, but it can be overcome, and I'd expect that within a few weeks of posting things should be mostly back to normal. There'll be a prominently placed link for those who want to dig into the archives.

If someone could volunteer to write an import script we'd obviously still love to merge the forums. We looked into having this done professionally, but we currently don't have the resources.

The new layout will stay narrow as it avoids excess white space / line length on larger screens (i.e. the idea is that it's more readable for the same reason newspapers have columns). If you prefer it to use the full width, you can of course adjust it with a greasemonkey script or similar.