I think phpBB3 would probably be a lot nicer & easier to work with... I'm a member on a few phpBB3 forums and an admin on one, and I can assure you it's nicer than this from everyone's point of view.
Admins get complete control over everything on the board, and mods actually have powers (i.e. post editing, post deleting, etc.) without needing to heavily customize the installation... and oh yes, I forgot to mention the fine-grained permissions: permissions can be fine-grained right down to allowing one user, say, to put images in their posts while denying that to another user.
I'm pretty sure phpBB3 installation is simple, too... I haven't actually installed phpBB3 on a machine before, but I've heard good things about ease-of-installation.
On the normal (i.e. non-admin) user's side of things, there are a lot more smilies, special effects, etc.; quoting others is a lot more intuitive; and the (frequently crazy) comment nesting isn't there. Plus, users get private messageboxes - no more publicly posting e-mail addresses - and "View your posts" sections, which makes finding topics you've posted in actually possible!
Please? Pretty please?