It's not as if the idea of a change is a new one... many people here have already made plans on how to change everything to a new forum but keeping the old links active and so on.. it's simply a shame the team here doesnt leave 'us' the work... many here would gladly do it.
Why do the old links have to die? If you installed new forum software, imported the old database, but left a copy of the old forums active but read-only, the old links would still work, and the traffic would be reduced because there would be new forums.