Blech!
I looked at the BETA, but had no idea that such a flawed implementation was so close to being used. It will probably cut down on my FR viewing since its getting too hard to SCAN for news in all of the new graphics clutter. Bye the way, I've got DSL and it still takes to long to load the latest posts, too much time spent painting the left gutter column American Flag.
My suggestion would be to kill the left gutter column and put any admin/control info to the right. If this keeps up soon the FR presentation (not content) won't be much better than UBB sites.
Nothing ever seems to improve.