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Hi Baseline,
I think you'll find more than just better templates with Joomla.
In my experience developing sites on both platforms, joomla has hands-down, a much more active developer community with many, many more extensions (plug-ins) available, which are updated much more frequently.
True, the user communities for both are great, but I have had nothing but headaches trying to find good solutions for the sites i'm working with based on XOOPS.
So far, every solution in XOOPS I have found requires me to install modules that were created in 2004 or earlier, and never updated, and/or documented very poorly.
I'm sure XOOPS is perfectly suited for many site designs, but when push comes to shove, i think you'll find joomla is an environment that will supply you with much better solutions when you need them the most.
Don't need to slag XOOPS here, but that's the way I see it.
What type of site are you developing? What type of tools and modules do you need?
Make sure you ask all the right questions before you base your site on an infrastructure that won't give you what you need.