Honestly, ENW-crew, what are you doing? You are slowly turning the boards into "Gator", I haven't seen this much clutter and unnecessary images, colors etc. since 199[6-7] when every new homepage had javaapplets and animated GIFs. This is horrible, ENW (with ENW I mean the forum) has become the ugliest webpage I have seen in a while, and frankly I don't like it because it used to be quite clean (the vBulletin 2.x-layout). You know what? I think everyone agrees more or less but doesn't have the heart to tell you.
Ever single one of all the active users here has put up with lots of things that would kill a typical forum within a month, such as the excessive downtime, don't make this worse by experimenting with the design in public! Please understand that a forum with even over a few thousand users is like a 5-million-pound oil tanker, you cannot just change things around from one day to another without disturbing the peace.
Why don't you listen to the users for instance? There are a dozen threads that says "please fix the message preview when hovering the table cell". There are no single thread that says "please change the post reply button to something that's not meant for this background color". This is not a playground for theme design for the love of god!
My suggestion: There exists a perfectly functional vBulletin 2.x-style theme for vB 3, it is even in the default install but you have removed it from the list of user selectable themes for some reason. Make it the default theme, and change it so it looks exactly like the forum was 5 months ago. Then please don't touch it afterwards.
You guys are so good at running this place (in a non-technical sense) such as posting interesting content in the news and keeping the atmosphere friendly, why don't you put your effort there instead of letting the technical things (such as design etc) you know little about (sorry) get in the way?
We are, in fact, here for the people and atmosphere, right?
Now, you can either write a humorous reply, a defensive reply or a thank-you-for-the-criticism-reply. Please don't write anything, just read this post again. Thanks.