Your group is like mine, all old timers (some newcomers joined us but we are still an oldies group), enjoying flight sim for 20+ years... We used v2 and v5 in the past, as pilots and staff of other VA's, then decided to have our own (to really free us from everything a tight VA related), started fresh with v7.
As you thought, it was not a big deal for us to manually filing pireps, then we decided to have vmsAcars (not because we are lazy, but because we wanted to support it and have some automation for our pireps at the same time). We are happy to have both (this is why I developed and shared some addons for v7)
Hope you find the right answer for your group and continue enjoying sim together with your friends
Safe flights