I really don’t give two hoots about whether Discobot stays or gets turned off, but what I am definitely not seeing here is a compelling case to turn it off.
Some people like Discobot, some don’t. There is definitely nowhere near a majority consensus that Discobot (1) needs to go and (2) is an important enough issue that we need to focus on it at the moment. We’ve got much more important things to fix before we even consider looking at things like Discobot.
I know some people don’t handle change very well, but keeping vBulletin was not an option. Making Discourse behave exactly like vBulletin was not an option. Keeping everything the same was not an option.
If you don’t like Discobot, avatars, new smilies, scroll bars, or any other changes that come with switching software, sorry, but you’re just going to have to find a way to deal with it. We have much more important things to deal with at the moment. In the grand scheme of things, we still have the same forums we’ve had, we still have over two decades worth of posts, and we have a message board that doesn’t require constant reboots and database rebuilds just to stop it from completely grinding to a halt on a daily basis. Considering that we are not a huge money-maker for our owners, and despite that they still think that we are worth pouring a lot of money and effort into us to keep us going, I personally am just happy that we still have a functional message board.