I have some experience with Drupal7, but I never moved to the later versions of Drupal. To work with the latest version of Drupal would be like starting from scratch. This is not a reason for not giving it a try, but maybe there are other options that we may try first. CiviCRM seems to be good for collecting membership fees, donations, etc. but I think that an important aspect of an organization is communication and discussions. So, I would suggest that we first give a try to Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/).

I already have some experience with installing and maintaining it. It is also possible to import the archives of an existing mailing list, in order to bootstrap the discussions. But of course it has much more features than a mailing list. There are also lots of plugins available.

But let's continue the discussion on the other mailing list.

Regards,

Dashamir