Not denying that it's shit, I don't know anyone who's actually happy with it. But old forums also weren't built nicely.
You say search indexable as if it's a panacea, but you find whatever you want to find with your search engine, click the link, and it is:

• moved somewhere
• renamed, so now the link is dead
• was actually a part of badly implemented endless scroll so it now points to nothing
• was edited to remove crucial information
• was put in private and now you need to have 25 karma across three boards to open it
• someone got butthurt so it's now defaced
• all of the above and more.

So you know that the info was there at some point, but you can't access it.

The whole of IT is different levels of shit all the time