why not something futuristic

As they thought it was good probably. And how is it not futuristic?

They probably wanted something that would run on Django but appear similar to the forum platform they used on the 1.x website (I think it's PunBB).

they probably liked how easy it would be to seamlessly integrate with the rest of the django site. (users dont need to login to a separate site, and the ST doesn't need to syncronise data and whatnot)

At the time, DjangoBB was the popular, many people used it, at that time it had a lot of features, and as Jeffalo said, integration was very easy.

because the rest of the website ran on django. 3.0 should run on nodebb to keep it simple.

kccuber wrote:

because the rest of the website ran on django. 3.0 should run on nodebb to keep it simple.

I don't think they're planning on redesigning the forums right now.

Scratch137 wrote:

kccuber wrote:

because the rest of the website ran on django. 3.0 should run on nodebb to keep it simple.

I don't think they're planning on redesigning the forums right now.

Yeah, the forums are kind of dead and i believe paddle or another st said that there won't be any major forum updates soon because it's too much of a hassle to change the whole forum core. I'm not sure if someone said this, i think they did but it's a blurry memory from like a year ago.

Scratch 2.0 was built on the Django framework (I do not know the reasoning, but my guess is that they wanted something easier to work with than CakePHP which the 1.4 site was built on), and DjangoBB was the only forum system around at the time (and possibly still the only one around, I don't really know) that works with Django. I am pretty sure that they chose Django before choosing the forum system, but am not 100% on that.