I wasn't a fan of PhpBB either but got used to it as a user.

PunBB, Flux, and MyBB were fantastic for small admin teams. There was very little overhead for modification and maintenance. I ran a PunBB board for over a decade. It was extremely lightweight, and if you left off the footer ID & version info in the template you wouldn't get hacked nearly as easily as with the popular systems.

(One of the worst ever was when I used a Joomla-integrated forum though...that install seemed to be sniffed at by bots endlessly)

(There was also a German commerical PHP board that I was paid to maintain for my city, can't remember the name but it worked really well. It's probably still around)