Sourceforge was a lot less clunky and inaccessible 10 years ago. In '04/'05 they did a big site redesign that basically killed it. That's part of why github took off, a lot of people were waiting for the next old sourceforge.
You clearly remember a different Sourceforge than I do as it was always clunky and inaccessible.
I don't remember Sourceforge ever being anything but clunky and inaccessible, even back then. To be fair, I wasn't much of a programmer at that time, either.