Good thing then, that since I am a former DBA who knows SQL quite well, that I never claimed to be an enthusiastic amateur and never said I did not know SQL… 
Sorry, my bad; I was mixing up your post with RJKUgly’s directly beneath it.
I nonetheless stand by my point that re-engineering a fairly major bit of live software with minimal knowledge of the code itself, and with little or no development and test resources, is not something to be thrown to the community. Yet another reason is that thereafter, the admins become dependent on their volunteers for support. Admins for an unmodified board (or one using common vB mods) can go to the vB community for help, or even Jelsoft. A custom hack becomes dependent on the people who created it, who a year or so hence might not still be at the boards, might not respond to email, etc. and so forth. I’m sure all of us who’ve worked at software companies are aware of the nightmare of dealing with bespoke code written by someone who’s since departed.
The Reader just wants to host a board. It doesn’t (and shouldn’t) want to get involved in running a software engineering project, no matter how keen or qualified the volunteers involved may be.
SSC times out a lot more than the SDMB, and it’s often down for hours at a time. Search wasn’t enabled until a few months ago.