Examples for vB community sites needed
 

Hi,

We are currently evaluating a complete redeployment of a large community-driven website with several 10k users and around half a thousand users active at the same time (might be a bit more, might be a bit less).

The website is heavily centered around the community, with Buddy funcitonality, user profiles with personal info/personal galleries/personal videos/guestbooks, private messaging, user groups with their own forums, an event calender for parties and corresponding galleries of pictures of those parties with comment and marking functionality. There is much much more currently implemented, but to be frank looking at the things to be done in future the whole system might be better off being reworked from the ground up.

What I need are two things:
- Examples of (preferrably large) party/community driven sites using vB and some kind of Portal (either a CMS integration or some portal skript) so the whole website doesn't look like it's built off a forum.
- An honest evaluation whether vB extended with custom and/or already written plugins would be a better choice than Joomla and co extended by their respective plugins.

I have personally used vB for another project for about 4 years now, bought an owned license back then and never regretted it. The focus for that project however was pretty much forum-based and this community website has completely different needs.
My opinion is that at the core of any community driven site you need extendable user profiles and a good framework for generated content (whether it be forum posts or gallery comments, it all boils down to threads). But I need examples of someone having set up a similar type of page so I can give examples to the other developers involved.

Thanks in advance for your help. :)