Hi guys,
If you’re building a new community (of which there already are quite a few), then why choose to create a site which is NOT built in SharePoint? Sorry, but I really don’t get that. Especially with all the new social features in 2013 I would expect all community sites to adopt 2013 as soon as possible. But that’s just my humble opinion 🙂
Just to reiterate what Vlad and Mark already said, we really did try as hard as we could to use SharePoint for this site. We asked ourselves the exact same question and really wanted it to be SharePoint and explored many different SharePoint options. But for all the reasons mentioned it just wasn’t feasible to get up and running at a reasonable cost and in the timeframe that we wanted.