yes, use mod_rewrite as google hates indexing pages that have "?" in the URI

Actually there is no benefit to having a .html extension and query strings (a.k.a. ? in your URL) is just fine and causes no problems.

This is getting to be a tired argument between us, but I still believe that simple .html pages do better than query stringed pages.

Something else I'm against are keywords in the URL. There is nothing worse than using vBSEO (for a forum, at least) and keyword stuffing each page like list-of-my-keywords.html. If everyone agrees that keyword stuffing in the actual pages is not good, why would they all think that keyword stuffing in the URLs is great??

As for why I am so confident in all of this? Experience.

When I purchased PFO from Kyle last month, he couldn't get the number of pages indexed in Google above 6,000 after trying for two years straight, despite using vBSEO. I used my vB hack on the site, changed the directory structure, and DIDN'T use 301 redirects (I purposefully wanted to start with a completely clean slate), and we were completely reindexed with 11,000 pages after 48 hours. A month later and we have 36,000 pages indexed in Google.