Amidst a sea of news posts with people both offering suggestions on the redesign and testing the new blog feature, I figure it couldn't hurt to add one more to the mix.

I have to say, the new design has left me...nonplussed. It looks fancier, undoubtably, but I just don't see how navigating will be any easier, aside from the user pages. It seems like the team crammed as much onto one page as they possibly could, sacrificing ease of use and simple navigation in favor of shiny new icons and layouts. The new icons look terrible, by the way, and typing is incredibly sluggish (I feel like I'm playing Guild Wars or something - Internet pages should be faster than this). They've done a good job, but I also feel something else has been left out among all this. Determined not to be left behind all the other fancy new developments going on elsewhere, in handheld devices, cars, and the Internet itself, the crew made everything as glossy as possible. No more will there be simple pages with minimal interference when you want to load a page or watch a movie. Everything's souped up to make users feel like they're in an iPhone commercial.

This is just one man's opinion, but it seems like they've forgotten that animation is just like reading a book - you should be entertained when you're spending time with the characters, living out a story as it unfolds, in a whole new world. It's never been about how fancy we can make the package, or how much detail we can put in to chroncling every aspect of the developer's life. After all, haven't we learned long ago not to rate a book by how fancy its cover is?