A vanilla server... here? Player's heads would explode! While I've done my fair share of vanilla, the community seems to resist vanilla. We've had vanilla+ style servers in the past, we had a vanilla 1.10 server (our anarchy server) they never catch on. Though dusting off a 1.13 vanilla with a limited rule set might not be a bad idea...
Yeah i was gonna say the only mods for 1.13 are optifine and the rift mods but generally speaking if the forge team has less trouble then they thought the road to 1.13 mods should be open up within a couple months i believe depending on how much backend work needs to be fixed