This is not a whine, for whinging sake. There are many valid complaints about the inability to actually USE FR, as it is now configured. If it is difficult / uncomfortable to use, there is little point in coming here. If FR now ONLY attracts the computer " elite " , kids who love all the bells and whistles stuff, and newbies, then it has utterly failed in its stated goals !
I said: Isn't it possible that much of the discomfort people are feeling right now is simply the result of having to learn something new, or having to simply adjust their ingrained expectations as to what they are going to be met with, visually, when the page pops up? If that is the case, then time (and a relatively small amount of it) will cure the 'problem.' If not, then maybe Jim and John do indeed have a formidable amount of re-working to do. I'm betting that it's eighty percent the former, and twenty percent the latter.
Your (big) concerns appear to be in the twenty-percent category, and I hope Jim and John can address them to your satisfaction. If not, the forum has indeed taken a giant step backwards. But I'm willing to bet that you're going to be happy with the adjustments that are no doubt in the works, if you're patient enough to hang around.
I have a moderately high speed link (On average just over 1.4mb) From the time I clicked on the hyperlink to this thread until the thread was completely loaded was something in the neighborhood of 30 - 40 seconds.
Now that's fairly fast, but it used to take less than 3 seconds to do the same job before someone messed with the system.
I suspect that the server on the other end is dishing out a lot of crap that is not really necessary to read these messages.
I have saved all of the links to the various news sources. Today I spent a good deal of my online time going directly to the source. I did miss out on some of the dialogue that I enjoy reading here but lately this place is getting to look a lot like usenet, and I can do without most of that.
Jim, bring back the old format! Please.