advanced forums module

I'm building a website that consist of a main website and three office locations/branches websites. The main website pulls content from all three locations.

Location websites must have a 'home page' with a unique url, as well as the main website ofcourse. Each location must have an allocated admin role that can manage that location content only.

I sure love Drupal -- except for the forums, which are pretty weak when compared to Simple Machines Forum or PHPbb. Even with the Advanced Forums module -- which improves things quite a bit -- the forums still come up short.

I'm working on integrating SMF with my Drupal 5 site now, and will look for Drupal 6 solutions in the future, so I'm wondering if anyone has good experience integrating one of these (or another) third-party boards.

Thanks!