Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Far as I know - no value at all for serps....but for searchers perhaps...depends on whether it might be a transactional query or a instructional one etc etc....

There are many times where I would take something similar to Scott's tact. I agree as well, he mentioned some good general practices. But this site has been in the wild for a bit and you just acquired it. This means there's a good bit of homework to do before overhauling the entire permalink structure, for what I suspect is a considerable number of pages/posts. Knowing nothing else, the safest opinion I can render is to keep the structure as is for existing pages/posts (current traffic/link/revenue considerations) - and consider a custom post type and custom permalink workaround ('Sperimenting! Woooo!) for fun and profit(?). Your developer, or the WP development community, may have a better solution. Though I generally tend to disagree with doing things simply because the competition is doing the same. If nothing else, the mentality tends to bleed over into everything. Just think of all the wasted time/opportunities. Some differentiation can be a good thing. But if the custom permalink URLs tend to out-perform the slightly-lesser-than-pretty URLs over time, you can do a cost/benefit of total URL permalink change. (Rewrites... rewrites as far as the eye can see... buzzlightyear.jpg) But yeah, you'll probably have to confront the previous posts/pages permalinks at some time. I'm just saying confront the issue with some primary data, with the aid of secondary data.