Is it that Firebird community does not have a vbulletin/phpBB bulletin
forum available?

I always find these mailing lists non intuitive. Bulletin forum would
have a good search, archiving, better thread handling etc... features.

Mailing lists are just too much chaos. Or do I just read it using a
wrong clients?

I use groups.yahoo.com site to follow Firebird lists and post through
same yahoo ui. It just lists all messages in a flat format, no
vbulletin threads, no good search, etc... lacking everything else you
expect to find at year 2006.